Ploid GTM brain

Ploid provides people search and enrichment infrastructure for developers, recruiters, and sales teams building AI-powered workflows.

category

People data API

market profile

  • text: People-data buyers need fresher identity and professional context than static exports provide.
  • text: The market includes API-first data providers as well as sales intelligence platforms.

personas

  • title: Developer building an AI agent
    pains:
    • People data is fragmented across sources
    • Agents need a searchable, current identity and context layer
  • title: Recruiting or talent research lead
    pains:
    • Building specialized candidate shortlists takes manual research
    • Static profile records miss experience expressed in posts or interviews
  • title: Sales operations lead
    pains:
    • Contact records become stale
    • Research and enrichment consume shared team capacity

icp

  • text: Software and AI product teams embedding people search or enrichment into applications and agents.
  • text: Sales and recruiting organizations with recurring people research and enrichment volume, from small teams to custom enterprise deployments.

message pillars

  • text: Give agents a unified people-data layer.
  • text: Connect identities across professional and social sites.
  • text: Access the index through existing agent tools.

objections

  • objection: How do we control usage costs?
    response: Plans pool credits across interfaces and allow an additional-usage spending limit.
  • objection: Can we use personal data compliantly?
    response: Review Ploid's data rights terms and assess the intended use with counsel before deployment.

competitors

  • name: People Data Labs
    website: https://peopledatalabs.com/
    why: People search and enrichment datasets and APIs.
  • name: Crustdata
    website: https://crustdata.com/
    why: People and company search and enrichment API.
  • name: Apollo.io
    website: https://apollo.io/
    why: Contact data and search for sales teams.

influencers

  • name: Manny Hernandez
    url: https://ploid.com/about
    why: Co-founder and CEO shaping the people-data vision.
  • name: Kamran Karic
    url: https://ploid.com/about
    why: Co-founder and CGO.

keywords

  • people data API
  • people search API
  • contact enrichment API
  • AI agent people search
  • candidate search API
  • identity resolution people data

voice

  • ambitious and agent-native
  • conversational and technically oriented

signals

  • text: Building agents that research people or enrich CRM and recruiting records.
  • text: Growing enrichment volume across multiple teams or interfaces.

stack

  • MCP
  • CLI

pricing

model: usage
starting price: $200/month for 1,000 credits

motion

hybrid

channels

  • SEO
  • documentation
  • X
  • LinkedIn

confidence

high

Founders

  • name: Emmanuel Hernandez
    title: Founder/CEO
    role: CEO
    bio: Co-founder and CEO of Ploid, a YC-backed people data and intelligence platform built on a proprietary index of more than 2 billion people, it powers natural language search, contact enrichment, and live crawling of any website. Before Ploid, Manny was the youngest engineer at Wander, where he worked on AI/ML recommendations, and he did LLM research at NYU. He grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and has lived in New York, Shanghai, and San Francisco. He also writes about the philosophy of AI.
  • name: Kamran Karic
    title: Founder/COO
    role: COO
    bio: Kamran did STEM Olympiad in Germany, selected as one of the top scorers out of 1,000+ students nationwide, and won two gold medals (math and science) against 5,000+ competitors. Received the City of Sarajevo's April 6th Youth Award. Previously did neuroscience research at Tsinghua University.

Back to YC companies