We’ve raised $14M from top VCs and operators at Plaid, OpenAI, Slack and many more.

Ada uses Kernel to build a trusted account data foundation and surface the accounts that truly match its ICP

>40 outbound reps
Series C
Customer service
60k–75k
Tier one accounts managed by Kernel
3-5x
Median time-to-contact improvement
HQ: Toronto, Canada
Founded: 2016
Website: Ada.cx

Ada runs on Kernel

“Kernel has become our source of truth for foundational account data.”

Isaac Smith
Senior Manager Marketing Operations
Key insight:
Median time-to-contact improved from 2–3 days to within hours, enabling sales teams to reach prospects 3–5× faster once engagement signals appear.

Introduction

The market for customer service platforms is intensely competitive. Buyers evaluating new technology investments already have established workflows, tooling, and internal champions. For Ada’s sales team, success depends on understanding which organizations truly fit its ideal customer profile and prioritizing those accounts early in the sales process.

Executing this at scale requires more than generic enrichment. If the underlying data is unreliable, prospecting lists quickly lose credibility with sales teams. Reps stop trusting the signals, marketing campaigns become harder to align with outbound efforts, and the data stops influencing how sellers actually prioritize accounts.

Ada partnered with Kernel to ensure its CRM was built on a clean, trustworthy account data foundation. Kernel first resolves account identity and corporate hierarchies so each record reflects the real organization being targeted, and territories can be designed around accurate company structures.

On top of this foundation, Kernel’s agents analyze company websites and other public signals to identify relevant technographic and operational indicators. These signals are written back into the CRM with transparent reasoning fields, allowing reps to see not only which attributes were identified but also the evidence behind that conclusion.

The result is a set of clean, customized account lists that both sales and marketing trust. Prospecting, ABM campaigns, and messaging align around the same reliable account data, giving reps the confidence to focus their time on the organizations most likely to benefit from Ada’s platform.

Strengthening the account data foundation for targeted prospecting

Ada wanted to ensure its CRM provided a strong foundation for scaling outbound and ABM programs built around precise ICP targeting. This began with maintaining a clean,consistent account structure so inbound enrichment and lead routing reliably mapped new leads to the correct company record.

When every lead attaches to the right account, engagement signals accumulate on the same organization rather than being scattered across duplicate or fragmented records. Marketing can see when target accounts are interacting with campaigns, ABM programs can coordinate outreach around those signals, and sales teams gain a complete view of activity across the account before prospecting.

Kernel reinforced this foundation by resolving the real-world identity behind every CRM account. Each record’s URL was used as an identifier to link the account to a real organization in Kernel’s global entity database. Kernel’s agents also analyzed key identifiers like account names, legal entity names, addresses, and CRM notes to confirm which organization each CRM record represented. Website analysis helped verify corporate domains, detect inactive or placeholder URLs, and confirm company identity through on-site content.

Once identities were confirmed, Kernel linked the CRM account ID to the relevant entity, strengthening the accuracy of the CRM by surfacing duplicate records referencing the same organization, inferring missing websites, and highlighting accounts that required correction. Kernel also mapped parent and subsidiary relationships, ensuring subsidiaries were associated with the correct parent organization for accurate territory design and account ownership.

Each hierarchy classification included transparent agentic reasoning, showing the evidence used to confirm identity and hierarchy relationships. This approach gave Ada a CRM anchored to verified organizations and accurate corporate structures, creating a reliable entity foundation for firmographic and technographic enrichment that sales and marketing teams could trust.

Reliable firmographics and technographic insight for ICP-driven prospecting

With the entity foundation in place, Ada used Kernel to strengthen the reliability of core firmographics used for segmentation and targeting.

Core firmographic attributes such as headcount and revenue were evaluated using Kernel’s agentic enrichment, which cross-checks multiple primary sources to reason the most accurate firmographic attribute. Each attribute is written back into the CRM alongside reasoning fields that describe the evidence used and how the conclusion was reached, giving RevOps transparency into how the value was determined. This is particularly valuable for private companies, where reliable public disclosures are limited.

Kernel’s level of data transparency allows firmographics to become a trusted operational input rather than a static enrichment field. RevOps can confidently segment the market between mid-market and enterprise accounts using accurate company size and revenue enrichment, ensuring territories and account lists reflect the true structure of the market.

On top of these firmographics, Kernel’s agents also identify technographic signals indicating the presence of existing customer support platforms. By analyzing company websites, product documentation, help centers, and other public sources, Kernel identifies references to existing support infrastructure and writes the logic and reasoning behind the enrichment directly into a reasoning field.

Because both firmographics and technographics are paired with transparent explanations, RevOps teams can understand why a company was categorized a certain way and trust the data used to generate account lists.

Sales reps benefit from the same visibility when prospecting. They can see which platform a prospect likely uses today, understand the supporting evidence, and tailor outreach accordingly. Marketing teams can align ABM campaigns around the same insights, ensuring segmentation, messaging, and outbound activity all operate from a consistent and trusted account data foundation.
Key insight:
Ada reduced its CRM from ~250,000 records to roughly 60–75,000 high-quality active accounts, removing duplicate, inactive, and low-fit entities and giving RevOps a clearer view of the real market.

“Traditional enrichment gives you static data points. Kernel gives you agentic data with the reasoning behind every decision, which means our RevOps and sales teams can trust it and actually act on it.”

Isaac Smith
Senior Manager Marketing Operations

“Kernel brings firmographics, custom verticals, and technographic insight together, built around resolved account identities. That’s what turns our GTM strategy into the account lists our sales and marketing teams work from every day.”

Isaac Smith
Senior Manager Marketing Operations
Key insight:
Kernel’s entity and enrichment foundation allows Ada to identify and prioritize the top ~5% of accounts that truly match its ICP, focusing sales development and marketing resources where conversion potential is highest.

Closing the loop: using precise account data to surface the highest-fit opportunities

Clean entity data combined with reliable firmographic and technographic enrichment enables Ada’s RevOps team to operate a closed-loop ICP strategy. Because attributes such as headcount, revenue, industry, and existing support infrastructure are structured and paired with reasoning, Ada can analyze performance across accounts that have been won, lost, or actively engaged and continuously refine its ideal customer profile.

Granular signals play a key role in this analysis. Combined with firmographics such as headcount, headcount growth, industry, and founding year, RevOps can identify the types of organizations most likely to convert and where Ada’s platform delivers the strongest value.

By building on resolved account identities and precise firmographics, Kernel can accurately estimate operational signals such as support ticket volumes based on high-quality underlying data. This enables Ada to consistently surface high-value accounts that might otherwise be missed by generic enrichment.

Kernel’s custom vertical modeling adds another layer of insight. Broad industries such as Software can be segmented into SaaS, and then further into niches such as EdTech platforms, HealthTech software companies, and other specialized SaaS categories. This allows RevOps to identify segments where pipeline quality and deal outcomes consistently outperform the average.

These insights feed directly into account scoring, tiering, and territory design. High-performing segments can be prioritized, emerging niches surfaced earlier, and SDR coverage expanded around the areas showing the strongest growth potential. Sales and marketing teams can then align messaging and ABM campaigns around the same insights, ensuring prospecting focuses on the companies most likely to benefit from Ada’s platform.

A simpler data stack and a clearer view of the market

By consolidating entity resolution, firmographics, technographics, and vertical segmentation into Kernel, Ada eliminated the need to stitch together multiple account data enrichment providers or rely on unpredictable account data waterfalls. Instead of reconciling conflicting datasets and managing overlapping tools, RevOps now works from a single, continuously maintained entity data layer inside the CRM.

This shift also reduced the operational burden of reactive data hygiene. With identities resolved, hierarchies maintained, and enrichment paired with transparent reasoning, RevOps and sales teams spend far less time correcting records, investigating duplicates, or debating account ownership. The data remains reliable enough that teams can focus on prospecting, segmentation, and strategy rather than maintenance.

Most importantly, Kernel gives Ada a clearer view of its true total addressable market. With accurate entities, firmographics, and technographic signals structured across the CRM, RevOps can map the market with greater precision, surface high-value accounts that were previously hidden in fragmented records, and allocate sales coverage with confidence.
Key insight:
RevOps spends significantly less time reviewing and validating account data, allowing the team to focus on market segmentation, ICP refinement, and territory strategy rather than reactive data cleanup.

“When my ABM campaigns deeply match my GTM strategy and SDR prospecting, the conversion rates of meetings booked are so much higher.”

Isaac Smith
Senior Manager Marketing Operations

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