Village.ai (formerly Village) vs Cust (formerly AskToSell)

Village.ai is a relationship intelligence platform that maps your team's professional network and surfaces warm introduction paths to any person or company. It works as a standalone app or as an API you can embed in your own product.

The platform syncs contacts from LinkedIn, email, and calendar, then maps 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections across coworkers, investors, and communities. It draws on 4.77 billion mapped relationships across 775 million people and 52 million companies, using signals like work overlaps, funding history, education, and synced Village user networks.

Teams use Village for sales prospecting, recruiting, fundraising, and job search. Search any target and Village ranks the warmest intro path through your network. The platform also offers AI network search, candidate screening, intro request templates, browser extension, CRM integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot, and a REST API with SDKs for embedding relationship intelligence in other products.

Cust deploys AI Retention Agents that monitor your entire customer portfolio for churn risks and expansion signals. Each agent connects to your CRM, email, calendar, and data sources to deep-research accounts continuously. It drafts retention actions you can review and run in one click, from QBR briefs to renewal proposals. The product evolved from AskToSell, which originally focused on autonomous small-deal sales automation.

Where platforms like Gainsight and ChurnZero expect months of implementation and rigid if/else automation rules, Cust positions itself around adaptive, goal-based retention agents steered with plain language. The homepage contrasts legacy customer success platforms that need consultants and certification courses with one-click actions that go live the same day. You connect data and get a prioritized portfolio newsfeed rather than another dashboard with surface-level health scores.

Customer success managers and retention engineers who manage hundreds of accounts but can only give real attention to their top tier are the core audience. Cust targets teams trying to increase net revenue retention without hiring more CSMs per account. Plans scale from 100 protected customers on Foundation to 500 on Growth, with unlimited seats on every tier.