Enterprise sales deals don't just die because of bad products or pricing. They die because the wrong person was in the room — or because the right person quietly left and nobody noticed. That's the insight behind Centralize, a San Francisco-based startup emerging from stealth today with a $15 million Series A and a clear thesis: relationships are the one thing AI can't commoditize.

The Round

The Series A was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from:

  • Salesforce Ventures
  • Y Combinator
  • 20 Sales, Ritual Capital, Adverb Ventures
  • Angel investors including former Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield and Scott Woody, CEO of Metronome

Combined with a previous $4 million seed round also led by Salesforce Ventures, Centralize has now raised $19 million in total since its 2023 founding.

Who Built It

Rachit Kataria (CEO) and William Wang (CTO) met as engineering students at the University of Southern California and spent years inside Big Tech before founding Centralize through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch.

Kataria was a founding engineer on Facebook Shops at Meta, scaling the platform from zero to 250 million monthly active users in under a year during the COVID-19 e-commerce surge. Wang built Slack Huddles from scratch alongside CTO Cal Henderson and CEO Stewart Butterfield, later leading engineering and product teams at Slack.

The founding insight came later, when Kataria was a product tech lead at AtoB, a YC-backed fleet card startup. His team paused two weeks of engineering work to ship a fix for a churning enterprise customer — only to discover the effort was moot.

"We did a retro, and wouldn't you know? The person who's asking for the new request was the new decision maker [we] didn't even realize existed. We missed the fact that the prior person had left, and the context had shifted hands, and no one had tracked that."

What Centralize Actually Does

Centralize targets what Kataria calls the "multi-threading" problem: the failure to identify and engage all the stakeholders — procurement, legal, the C-suite — who influence whether an enterprise deal closes or churns.

Rather than a static CRM record, Centralize is a visual, multiplayer surface built around automated org charts. AI agents ingest first-party data — call recordings, emails, calendar events, web sources — to continuously rebuild a live map of key relationships inside a target account.

Its AI assistant, Centra, can answer questions like "Who owns the budget?" or "How do we approach the CRO?" in seconds. It also flags when a champion leaves, a new decision-maker enters, or engagement on a key deal drops.

"It's kind of like a deal GPS. The people are the map. It's basically like a landscape of who we know, who's missing, how we get there, and then it's the turn-by-turn navigation."

The platform charges enterprise revenue teams based on "accounts under management" with unlimited seats, designed to encourage account executives, SDRs, and customer success managers to collaborate on account maps in real time.

Traction and Growth

Centralize brought its primary product to market in December 2024. Since then:

  • Revenue has grown nearly 8x
  • Clients include CoreWeave, Cognition, Decagon, Brex, Webflow, LangChain, and MaintainX

Alongside the funding announcement, Centralize is launching a free single-player tier — letting individual account executives build account maps and introduce the tool organically to their leadership teams, a classic bottoms-up SaaS motion.

Why This Matters Now

Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, venture partner at NEA, framed the thesis bluntly:

"The entire revenue tech stack was built around activity capture, rather than navigating buying committees. That's a structural gap, and it's only widening as AI raises the stakes."

She noted that buying committees have nearly doubled in size over the last decade — a fact that makes multi-threading not just a best practice but a survival skill for enterprise sales teams.

For startup founders and revenue leaders, the implication is direct: the tools built to track activity (calls logged, emails sent) were never designed to track relationships (who's actually deciding, who just left, who's blocking the deal). That gap is what Centralize is betting the market will pay to close.

Broader market data backs the timing. Crunchbase data shows 2026 is on pace to surpass 2025 in venture investment into sales, marketing, and CRM technology — itself the strongest year since 2022 — as AI continues to reshape what the revenue stack looks like.