Exclusive: Former Meta And Slack Engineers Raise $15M For New Startup Centralize To Build A ‘Deal GPS’ For Enterprise Sales

Meta — while working as a product tech lead at a startup, Rachit Kataria watched a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar enterprise account suddenly fall into jeopardy.  After pausing his entire engineering team’s workload for two weeks to ship a requested fix, he discovered the effort made no difference. The customer still threatened to churn.

“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,” said Kataria, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Centralize, in an interview. “We missed the fact that the prior person had left, and the context had shifted hands, and no one had tracked that.” Centralize co-founders Rachit Kataria (left) and William Wang. [courtesy photo] That breakdown planted the seed for Centralize, an enterprise sales platform emerging from stealth today alongside a $15 million Series A funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The financing includes participation from Salesforce Ventures,1 Y Combinator, 20 Sales, Ritual Capital, Adverb Ventures and high-profile angel investors including former Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield and Scott Woody, CEO and founder of Metronome.  Combined with a previous $4 million seed round led by Salesforce Ventures, Centralize has now raised $19 million since its 2023 inception to build what Kataria calls a “deal GPS” for enterprise revenue teams. Engineered by Big Tech vets Kataria and co-founder and CTO William Wang met more than a decade ago as engineering students at the University of Southern California.  Both went on to build high-scale products across Big Tech. Kataria served as a founding engineer on Facebook Shops during Meta’s e-commerce push during COVID-19, scaling the platform from zero to a quarter billion monthly active users in a year. Wang, meanwhile, created Slack Huddles, building the initial version alongside Slack executives Cal Henderson (CTO), Noah Weiss (VP of product), and Butterfield (CEO), and later leading engineering and product teams at Slack. After honing their technical chops in big tech, Kataria joined Y Combinator-backed fleet card startup AtoB as a product tech lead. It was there, while working closely with go-to-market teams to save that churning enterprise customer, that he recognized a fundamental gap in modern revenue operations. “It was just this sea of information that no one had a handle on. The deal was at risk because the relationship is what mattered most, and we didn’t have a handle on it,” Kataria told Crunchbase News in an interview. “One of the things that we always say is that the one thing AI can’t commoditize is relationships.” Solving the ‘multi-threading’ problem Founded through Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, Centralize aims to fix what Kataria describes as a lack of an actual relationship layer in modern sales platforms. After bringing its primary product to market in December 2024, Centralize focused heavily on “multi-threading,” or the practice of identifying, engaging, and organizing all necessary stakeholders high and wide within a target company, from procurement and legal up to the C-suite. Rather than acting as a static record, Centralize operates as a visual, multiplayer surface centered around automated org charts that function like a map.