For revenue and customer success teams, the most critical data about a client is often the most scattered. It lives in signed contracts, email threads, support tickets, and usage dashboards, forcing manual reconciliation before a single invoice can be sent or a renewal conversation can begin. Paloma, a San Francisco startup founded in 2025, is betting that an AI-native CRM can stitch these fragments into a single, actionable source of truth, automating the operational grind of post-sales while surfacing the revenue opportunities hidden within it [Y Combinator, 2025].
The wedge is the invoice
Paloma’s initial focus is narrow and operational: turning complex contract terms into accurate, automated billing instructions. The platform ingests contracts, communications, and service consumption data, parsing them into a unified customer profile [Y Combinator, 2025]. From this foundation, it aims to automate billing workflows and proactively flag changes in usage, churn risks, and expansion opportunities, all prioritized by potential revenue impact [Y Combinator, 2025]. The bet is that by solving the painful, manual bottleneck of invoicing first, Paloma earns its place in the revenue stack, with the broader vision of becoming the system of record for all post-sales customer operations.
A team built on scale
The founders bring a specific and relevant pedigree to this problem. All three co-founders,CEO Nazli Danis, CRO Alex Avnit, and CTO Kaiwen Song,previously worked together at Deel, the global payroll and compliance platform [Startup Intros, 2025]. There, they claim responsibility for building Deel’s largest revenue-generating product from zero to scale [Kaiwen Song LinkedIn, 2026]. This experience in navigating the complexities of global contracts, compliance, and automated payments directly informs Paloma’s focus. Their early-stage credibility is underscored by a tier-one investor roster that includes First Round Capital and Y Combinator, which led the company’s most recent seed round [Startup Intros, 2025].
| Founder | Role | Prior Experience |
|---|---|---|
| Nazli Danis | CEO & Co-Founder | Product leadership at Deel [Startup Intros, 2025] |
| Alex Avnit | CRO & Co-Founder | Revenue/growth at Deel [Startup Intros, 2025] |
| Kaiwen Song | CTO & Co-Founder | Engineering leadership at Deel [Startup Intros, 2025] |
Navigating a crowded but fragmented landscape
The ambition is large, but the competitive context is complex. Paloma is not entering a green field. It sits at the convergence of several established software categories, each with its own incumbents. The company is effectively proposing a new layer that connects customer success platforms (an estimated $1.8B market), revenue operations software ($4.4B), contract lifecycle management ($1.6B), and invoice automation ($3.37B) [FYI Combinator, 2026]. The risk is being caught between point solutions that do one thing deeply and sprawling enterprise CRMs that are too generalized for post-sales nuance.
- Integration burden. Paloma’s value hinges on deep, reliable integrations with a company’s existing CRM, billing software, and data warehouses. Any friction in this data plumbing immediately undermines the promise of a unified “ground truth.”
- The abstraction challenge. The AI that parses contracts and predicts churn must be exceptionally accurate. In billing, errors are not just inconvenient; they erode customer trust and create accounting headaches, potentially outweighing the automation benefits.
- Motion to expansion. Success with the initial billing wedge must be rapid and undeniable to justify expansion into the broader post-sales workflow. If the automation is only partial, requiring significant human review, the product becomes another dashboard to monitor, not a system that replaces work.
For the teams Paloma targets, the standard of care today is a familiar kind of operational tax. Finance personnel manually extract pricing terms from PDF contracts to build invoices in NetSuite or Stripe. Customer success managers cross-reference Slack threads, Zendesk tickets, and Gong calls to prepare for a renewal conversation, often missing subtle signals of dissatisfaction or opportunity. This fragmentation creates revenue leakage, delays, and a constant risk of human error. The patient population here is the B2B company with a growing customer base, where the complexity of contract terms and the volume of customer interactions have outpaced the capabilities of spreadsheets and general-purpose CRMs.
What to watch in the next twelve months
The coming year will be about moving from a promising wedge to validated traction. The key signals will be less about raw customer counts and more about depth of deployment and automation. Can Paloma point to named customers who have significantly reduced their invoice-to-cash cycle time or identified a material upsell through its platform? The company’s reported revenue of $330,000 in September 2025 suggests early commercial activity, but the nature of that revenue,whether it’s from pilot projects or scaled deployments,remains to be seen [GetLatka, 2026]. The founders’ experience at Deel suggests they understand the enterprise sales motion, but proving it for their own product is the next test. For now, Paloma represents a carefully scoped bet that the most valuable AI in business software might be the one that simply connects the dots everyone already has, starting with the bill.
Sources
- [Startup Intros, 2025] Paloma: Funding, Team & Investors | https://startupintros.com/orgs/paloma
- [Y Combinator, 2025] Paloma: AI-native CRM for putting post-sales operations on autopilot | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/paloma
- [Kaiwen Song LinkedIn, 2026] Kaiwen Song - Paloma (YC S25) | LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaiwen-song/
- [FYI Combinator, 2026] Paloma | FYI Combinator | https://fyicombinator.com/company/paloma
- [GetLatka, 2026] How Paloma AI hit $330K revenue with a 3 person team in 2025. | https://getlatka.com/companies/getpaloma.ai