Case Study
How Crustdata built its entire technical sales team with Contrario
Crustdata crossed eight figures with a single person running sales. Here's how Contrario helped them build a sales team technical enough to sell a data product to developers.
Arya Marwaha
Co-Founder & CEO
May 16, 2026
30 days
to build the sales team
$10M
in ARR, and growing
100%
of their sales team hired through Contrario
Crustdata provides real-time B2B company and people data through simple APIs, powering the AI sales, recruiting, and investment tools that builders rely on. Backed by Y Combinator and a $6M seed round, the company needed a go-to-market team, and it needed sellers who could hold their own with the developers they'd be selling to.
Sarah Chan
Founding Account Executive
Doug Webb
Founding Account Executive
Anmol Bhide
Founding Growth
Jack Wang
Founding Solutions Engineer
The Problem
A very technical bar, and vendors that sent noise
Crustdata is obsessive about talent. Even its non-technical roles carry a technical bar, because selling a developer-first data product means hiring people who genuinely understand the product. That made most vendors a poor fit.
Crustdata had tried other marketplaces and agencies before Contrario. The hires did not stick. For a company growing this fast, with sales resting on one person, that was not a gap Crustdata could afford to leave open.
The Solution
Fewer candidates, calibrated to the bar
Crustdata's roles ran through Contrario's marketplace, with several recruiters matched to the searches. Once the recruiters understood how high Crustdata's bar actually was, they severely tightened the top of the funnel and sent only high-quality candidates.
The profiles reflected that. Contrario placed an account executive out of Palantir, a Harvard grad and repeat President's Club winner, and another out of Stripe who had hit 1,000% of quota. It also placed multiple ex-founders, an archetype Crustdata considers close to ideal.
The impact
One AE to a full sales team
From a single account executive, Crustdata built out its entire sales team through Contrario, and the team came together in about a month. Just as important as the speed: every one of the hires stuck, which the prior vendors could not deliver.
"We went from one AE to a real team. Every hire is still here, still pushing."
— Chris Pisarski, Co-founder, Crustdata
Crustdata is now approaching $10M in ARR, growth it credits in large part to the team Contrario placed. The partnership is expanding accordingly. Crustdata plans to run another 12 to 15 roles through Contrario, including more account executives, BDRs, a business operations hire, and product managers, along with its first engineering hires.
The relationship runs both ways. Contrario relies on Crustdata to power its own data, a partnership that started when the two teams first met at a Crustdata event in San Francisco.
As Crustdata scales toward its next stage of growth, Contrario will continue to build its team alongside it.
Crustdata
Real-Time B2B Data APIs
Industry
B2B Data Infrastructure
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Employees
20+
Stage
Seed
FOUNDERS
Abhilash Chowdhary
Co-Founder
Chris Pisarski
Co-Founder
Manmohit Grewal
Co-Founder
Roles Hired via Contrario
Account Executive
x2
Founding GTM
Founding Solutions Engineer
3+ roles ongoing…
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PRODUCT
© Contrario Inc. 2026
