Let s be honest: AI is getting eerily good at sounding human. It can craft hyper-personalized content and emails, and handle entire conversations. It s also made sales outreach noisier and eroded trust in once-reliable channels like email, chat, and even voice and crazy enough, video. But it s so seductive and fast. It s learning and adapting faster than ever. And it s not going to stop: in Q1, it already represented the majority share of global venture capital funding.
But one thing AI still can t fabricate is a real, trusted human relationship. These can t be made up or scaled with prompts. They re built through shared experiences, mutual trust, and real-world context.
And yet, in today s business world, precious human connections are slipping through the cracks. They re buried in inboxes, lost in forgotten LinkedIn threads, siloed in the minds of your team and stakeholders. The right lead, investor, or candidate is often just one intro away, hidden in the network you already have. LinkedIn is great if you re an individual building an audience but it fails to unlock the collective relationship capital of an entire company.
The Swarm
Hey Product Hunt! I’m David, CEO at The Swarm.
Let’s be real—cold outreach is broken. Gen AI has only made things noisier. People are tuning out, and you can smell automation a mile away.
Instead, we believe the future of sales lies in real, human relationships. Instead of another sales hack, we built a platform for anyone to use, plus a new data layer and API for developers and builders.
Before this, I founded Automately.io (acquired by Sequoia Capital), where I then built tools to help the portfolio tap into Sequoia's network. I ran hundreds of discovery sessions and saw even the best companies struggling with messy spreadsheets and Slack channels, all to answer one question: “Who do we know at company X?”
LinkedIn in particular was too loose, too noisy, hard to export, and impossible to integrate with other tools. That’s when I saw the gap.
Since 2021, The Swarm has helped hundreds of companies map and unlock extended networks: not just LinkedIn connections, but also shared work experiences, school alumni, and shared investors. Every connection is scored so you find the strongest one.
Four ways to Swarm:
📡 API – Build our data into your products (includes people/company data, job changes, and relationship intelligence data)
🧭 SaaS – Map and combine your company network in one place
🎯 Clay – Warm intros to people or company in your Clay tables
🧩 LinkedIn – Free Chrome Extension for warm intros plus 200M business emails revealed on top of profiles
Big thanks to @chrismessina for the hunt and support!
— David
Co-Founder & CEO @ The Swarm 🐝💛
@chrismessina @david_connors Super cool launch, David! Love how Swarm makes real relationships the core of outreach—way better than cold spam. Would love to see a Slack or CRM plugin next. Congrats!
The Swarm
Thanks@amanamals - great idea. We have a flexible API that can push data into your CRM/Slack but it's not a native integration... yet! :)
@chrismessina @david_connors Any move toward more humane / less automatized connection-making is more than welcome in this world.
I absolutely agree that LinkedIn does a particularly mediocre job on this account, especially given its original potential. I guess making it just another social medium generates more revenues. But that also creates gaps to fill.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for The Swarm.
The Swarm
Agreed@pawelbrodzinski, there's a big opportunity that LinkedIn has left open as they're now more focused on 'getting followers and building an audience' rather than understanding the real relationships you can tap into. Appreciate your support!
@chrismessina @david_connors Hey David, Congrats!
I have a use cases and curious to know your thoughts. I see a missing link while i execute my lead gen for my platform. I am struggling to find new avenues to generate new leads everyday that are meaningful and not just numbers for my campaign. I have struggled to find any platform that does that job. everyone is looking at LinkedIn for 2-3 chooses DBs that are outdated with latest info and everyone is reaching out to same folks and this causes fatigue at both ends.
Does Swarm somehow solve that problem or intend to solve it in future?
The Swarm
Hi @imraju - thanks for your support! We are definitely agreed that buyer's are fatigued from all of the noise that lands in their inbox. So now when they start evaluating new tools they turn to those people they trust: their peers, advisors, communities, their investors, etc.
We're helping companies to orchestrate that entire Go-To-Network motion. This starts with firstly mapping your company's network, calculating connection strength scoring, then leveraging those connections in workflows. There are many use cases from direct warm intros to influence/backchanneling.
LendLayer
@chrismessina @david_connors As a longtime Swarm supporter, and someone who's been building intro and network tools for the past few years, I have to say the Swarm team is incredibly thoughtful, clever, and fast-moving at advancing tooling in this space.
Human relationships are complex, and finding signals of true connection strength is messy.
Glad this team is continuing to build at the frontier here and make warm intros accessible.
The Swarm
Thanks @moxon - we appreciate all your early product feedback and ongoing support!
Toki: AI Reminder & Calendar
@chrismessina @david_connors Love the tagline. If relationship truly is back Im so gonna come back and thank you in review hahahhaha
@chrismessina @david_connors @sophiaatdola I doubt it relationship will ever come back but yeah upvote hahah
The Swarm
The best way to get investors attention? Even kids know it's warm intros. The Swarm is your companion for this. Use The Swarm to discover all intro paths.
Your company already raised funding? The portfolio companies of your investors are the best source of early customers, partnerships and more. The Swarm gives you a map of your investors portfolio network in few clicks.
The Swarm Team is here to answer any questions.
Tyce
@michal_bil So true—warm intros really are the cheat code for early traction. Love the idea of mapping investor networks like this. Curious—have you seen more founders using it for partnerships or early customer discovery?
The Swarm
@lylia_djaitpaulien Yea, that's the next step after getting an investor is to leverage their portfolio. Many companies have been doing for a long time, we're just making it easier.
Integration with other services like LinkedIn and Clay gives The Swarm an edge. What gives The Swarm more edge is the API for builders. It makes room for more integration. Just like the relationships of people you value, I hope The Swarm gets more relationships with other services!
The Swarm
@hyuntak_lee Thanks! Yes, we have several new integrations coming up soon, on both sides: new sources of relationships (for example Outlook) as well as new interfaces to leverage the data (for example, native HubSpot integration).