Armory had the privilege of leading a growth round in Champion, a startup transforming the way companies leverage customer advocacy. This transformation is critical at a time when enterprise buyer trust is at an all-time low, owing as much to the degradation of third-party review platforms as to the deluge of AI-generated outreach hitting our inboxes.

At the very moment when failed enterprise software implementations are costlier than ever, buyers have fewer reliable validation signals than ever before. So how is an AI startup countering the worst excesses of the slop era? By taking a human-centric approach that counters synthetic noise with peer-to-peer signal.

Surface-level polish is often misleading in an age where savvy vendors can scrap together marketing collateral in minutes or vibe code counterfeit features for customer demos. Unable to trust their own eyes, wary buyers turn to the only validation channel that algorithms cannot pastiche: references from peers who have run a given platform in production. In venture, we rely on customer reference calls above almost every other input for that exact reason. Yet inside many enterprise GTM organizations, customer advocacy is still treated like an informal brand chore, relegated to ad-hoc favors, gift cards, and stale quote libraries.

Champion emerged from the premise that advocacy belongs squarely in the core revenue workflow. Anchored between Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and New York City, the company turns latent customer relationships into an attributable growth engine they call Customer Revenue Orchestration. By integrating directly into existing GTM systems, the platform surfaces an organization’s highest-propensity champions and orchestrates them across the sales cycle for warm intros, peer references, and strategic advocacy plays. Crucially, Champion closes the loop by mapping those interactions directly to Salesforce opportunity outcomes, giving CROs and RevOps leaders the ability to connect advocacy directly to closed-won revenue. The impact is immediate: early enterprise customers report near-perfect win rates on pipeline opportunities where reference calls were facilitated through Champion.

Executing this thesis requires unusual operational maturity and clear-sightedness. Champion originally launched into the HubSpot SMB ecosystem, building an early base of customers and revenue. But as the team tracked usage patterns, they realized the true enterprise leverage lived in complex, high-stakes sales cycles where reference calls make or break the deal. Earlier this year, the founders made the difficult call to sunset the SMB product entirely, willingly walking away from almost half a million in ARR to focus exclusively on enterprise Salesforce accounts. Since the pivot, Champion has seen its margins and retention surge while expanding ACVs and consistently winning enterprise logos on multi-year terms.

Throughout the diligence process, we were deeply impressed by Champion’s founding team. CEO Jeff Reekers previously spent six years scaling Aircall from under $1 million to over $100 million in ARR as the company’s CMO. It was at Aircall that Jeff first observed individual customer champions driving millions in untracked pipeline — without software to measure it. To market this missing software, he partnered with Gianna Scorsone, his former GM of North America at Aircall, whose commercial rigor across two decades in operations powers the company’s GTM execution. And to architect it, he partnered with CTO Courtney Crispin, who brings nearly thirty years of engineering leadership (including five years as VP of Software Engineering at Salesforce), providing the requisite foundation to sell securely into complex enterprise IT environments from day one.

What excites us most is the organic fashion in which this dynamic compounds. As operators transition between organizations throughout their careers, they carry Champion with them, creating a rare, organic flywheel across the B2B ecosystem. And as the platform becomes an indispensable fixture across sales cycles, it gives revenue leaders what they’ve long been missing: a permanent, attributable system to mobilize their most valuable asset — the customers who already know their value firsthand.

Truly exceptional products need a way to stand out from superficially polished competitors. Champion provides buyers with precisely that filtering mechanism. We are proud to partner with Jeff, Gianna, Courtney, and the entire Champion team as they build the infrastructure that puts authentic human relationships back at the center of enterprise growth.