Scaling Europe
00:00:00 · Sebastian Johnson, Nicolas Sharp
[00:00:00] S0: Hello, and welcome back to Scaling Europe show. I'm Sebastian. Today on the show, we've got Nicolas Sharp, founder, CEO of Attio, longtime friend of the show. How are doing, Nick? [00:00:07] S1: I'm good. I'm good. Good to be back, Seb. How are you doing? [00:00:10] S0: Very good. Thank you. You guys have been cooking up some great stuff. You're here to talk specifically about, I guess, the future of Attio, the future kind of agentic revenue building the architecture. Tell me about it. What's going on with Attio? [00:00:23] S1: Well, I think let's start with what's going on in the world, in the world of software specifically, which is that we are just seeing an extraordinary scale of agent adoption. And specifically amongst our customers who tend to be at the leading edge of this stuff, we've just seen agent adoption go absolutely wild. And we believe kind of the next generation of software users are gonna be agents and that what we have built in the past, the software that currently powers most of the world is not ready for this agent revolution. And today, what we're launching today is our new architecture for Attio, which is agent ready, fundamentally agent ready. We'll dig into the details, but a huge, huge leap in capabilities. [00:01:14] S0: I saw, I think a few weeks ago, you announced agent login that there were some numbers like 80,000 active agents.
00:01:14 · Sebastian Johnson, Nicolas Sharp
[00:01:14] S0: I saw, I think a few weeks ago, you announced agent login that there were some numbers like 80,000 active agents. [00:01:21] S1: Yeah. Crazy. Can you talk about Yeah. So it's actually... I mean, the numbers are going up even more. Like, I ran some stats before this call and our MCP usage is growing 50% month over month. [00:01:33] S0: So just And it was 11,000,000 a month, wasn't it? I saw that it was eleven eleven million MCP calls a month. [00:01:40] S1: Yeah. We're we're now up to... We're now on a run... Or, like, for this month, we'll do something like almost 40,000,000. So we'll be at about 37... 36, 37,000,000 this month. [00:01:52] S0: That is insane. Can you talk about kind of what what are people doing? Like, why are people doing these things? What are the agents doing?
00:01:58 · Nicolas Sharp
[00:01:58] S1: So, mean, the big shift here has gone from people having to drive work. And so, these tools being used as essentially... If you think about what software has historically been, it's been application software, business application software that's been driven by humans, and it's been infrastructure that has been driven by machines. Now, the software driven by humans is fundamentally... The amount of work that could be done is limited by how much a human can do on a computer, which actually is not very much. And then on the other side, you've had architecture for machines, APIs, databases, infrastructure that can run at extraordinary scale, but was very narrow in the scope that could be... Is all deterministic or all very tight. And what we've basically seen is a blending of these two worlds. So work at the complexity of human work, but at the scale of machines and infrastructure. And this is what we're essentially seeing is we're seeing people running now. They are doing end to end work using agents. Those agents need place to work. Need tools. They need a system of record. They need all of those things. And we've just seen an explosion in what people are able to build, how long these tasks can run for, how long these agents can run for. And it's just a huge proliferation. And so the architecture that we're announcing today blends these two worlds together, where we're essentially giving agents infrastructure level scale and power, but with all of the guardrails that you expect from business application software. And more concretely, that means is that Attio is now fully accessible as infrastructure, as a database. So you can interact with Attio through SQL now, which obviously all of the labs are... They're all trying to hit benchmarks. They're all RL ing on on all of the... You know, on on on SQL. And so your agent is completely unleashed. You know, you get the kind of power of of... You get the full power of the model and and all of the guardrails you'd expect from from business application software.
00:04:14 · Sebastian Johnson, Nicolas Sharp
[00:04:14] S0: So do you see yourself moving away? Is that no longer a software tool? Is it now something much deeper and broader? And is that going to be true for, do you think, the next generation of what we would have called software tools before? [00:04:25] S1: Yeah, I think there's going be a real blurring of the lines because the scale that these systems need to run at operate at now is just absolutely massive. And one of the big things we're also announcing today is a massive increase in the amount of data that Attio can handle. So we have customers today that have tens of millions of records of any one object type. We're upping the limits on the amount of records that our customers can store, another order of magnitude. And we are also massively expanding the types of data that Attio can store. So we're now starting to allow our customers to ingest event data as well. So you don't just get... You've always had an Attio, you've always had kind of email and calendar and calls and all this kind of stuff, but you can now start putting in third party and external event data too. So things like website visits and stuff like that. And of course, to make all of this work really well, we've had to add... We'll get a bit technical here, but you've had to add a concept called interfaces, which allows you to sort of bundle similar types of events together so that you can report across all of these things really easily. But the line between infrastructure and software is essentially, you know, we we see it as completely eroding.
00:05:52 · Sebastian Johnson, Nicolas Sharp
[00:05:52] S0: And what does this mean for the business model? I guess because I saw recently post on LinkedIn that you signed an 8 figure compute deal. As you have more agents doing more and more work, it's expensive, right? What does that mean for the way that you think about capitalizing your business? [00:06:05] S1: Yeah, it is, but we're also, we're growing extremely well. Our customer base is growing phenomenally well. Revenue has been growing phenomenally well as well. And so, we're in a very, very good spot. And actually we think that this is pretty exciting because far from being sort of the end of software, we think this is going to be a complete explosion in the utility of these systems. And we think that we are essentially going to get all of these new software users in the form of agents. And so our market will just continue to grow as these get further adopted. So we're pretty bullish. [00:06:48] S0: Yeah, I love it. It's like you can almost see it in your mind that type of work humans can do on software is so limited compared to
00:06:48 · Sebastian Johnson, Nicolas Sharp
[00:06:48] S0: Yeah, I love it. It's like you can almost see it in your mind that type of work humans can do on software is so limited compared to [00:06:56] S1: X number of agents. Sorry, I was going to just add, I think you're completely right there. But if you think about how limited the throughput of these systems was previously by especially the work that's very, that requires lot of, has a lot of unstructured data or what's historically been unstructured data, very high context work. It was really bottlenecked. And we all know that everyone, you know, there's the old kind of... In in the old world, you would have a calendar event in your diary to update the CRM. And that was something that you might do once a week if your manager put a ton of pressure, you know, put a ton of pressure on you. But now, Attio is being updated just continually in a loop. You know, every little signal that comes in is being... We're running inference on it. We're making updates. We're sending out webhooks. You know, we've got external agents acting in the system. There's just the... There's just orders and orders of magnitude more stuff happening in these systems now.