Cognism uses Kernel to identify buying centers in corporate hierarchies and segment its global market using custom enrichment.

100+ Reps

Series C

Sales Intelligence

250k

Accounts enriched with custom enrichment points

250k

Accounts mapped onto coporate hierarchies

HQ: London, England

Founded: 2015

Website: cognism.com

Cognism runs on Kernel

“Kernel’s ability to enrich accounts with custom insights at scale is unparalleled.”

Antoine Cornet

Head of Revenue Operations at Cognism

Overview

Cognism is a market-leading sales intelligence platform serving businesses from enterprises through to small and medium businesses. Their reputation as the leading data enrichment provider for identifying decision-makers attracts large volumes of inbound leads from companies of all sizes.

Cognism previously used Dun & Bradstreet for corporate hierarchies. This data was often old, causing allocation problems. For instance, businesses that had doubled in size were assigned to the wrong market segment. Additionally, Cognism used LinkedIn Sales Insights for understanding the team composition of accounts (e.g., how many SDRs a company has)

The RevOps team manages a CRM with over 250,000 accounts while sourcing new accounts and handling thousands of inbound leads. The team needed to map new accounts to existing ones, including parent-child relationships, and enrich them with current, accurate data for better account allocation.

Cognism partnered with Kernel to build a complete market view with correctly mapped corporate hierarchies and AI-based enrichment, custom to Cognism. This process removed duplicates, improved account hygiene, and allowed for precise scoring of accounts across regions. This enables the RevOps team to allocate accounts to the correct market segments and improve sales efficiency.

Case Study →

“We take a focused and human approach to sales development. That starts with targeting the right accounts, and Kernel is integral to that.”

Catherine Olivier

VP of Sales Development at Cognism

AI Cleaning & Hierarchies:

To manage outdated account data, Cognism's RevOps team had to make corrections manually. Team members spent days each week on account hygiene, removing duplicates and identifying parent-child relationships. This work was necessary to keep the sales operation running.

In partnering with Kernel, Cognism's first step was to correct the master data. This involved finding missing websites, flagging defunct companies, and checking if existing websites were active or redirecting. With this foundational data in place, Kernel could deduplicate all accounts and map the corporate hierarchies.

In contrast to D&B, Kernel does not rely solely on official registries, which are slow to update and do not always include buying centers. Relying on stale and generic data fails to determine whether there is a strong enough buying center in EMEA to buy Cognism independently of a parent company. Instead, Kernel finds company relationships by analysing online data, such as websites, news articles, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn descriptions. Kernel provides the evidence for each relationship with a clear human-readable explanation.

AI Custom Enrichment:

As a sales intelligence platform, Cognism's account scoring system is highly sophisticated. The account propensity scoring assigns a value to businesses across every market, industry, and company size. Kernel's AI-based custom enrichment allows Cognism to confidently apply this granular scoring model to every account in the CRM and new inbound lead, knowing the underlying data reflects what Cognism's reps care about.

Previously, Cognism relied on LinkedIn Sales Insights, which was sunset in early 2025. Kernel acted as a drop-in replacement for core functionality, but also extended support for estimating a custom distribution of people across geographies. For example, calculating the number of SDRs in France, sales staff in the US, sales offices in EMEA, and whether a prospect account has an established outbound motion.

The challenges with LinkedIn Sales Insights and many other tools focused on estimating team composition are:

Account identity confusion: Is it the SDR count of the French subsidiary or the global parent?

Keyword matching that doesn't capture nuances, such as SDRs not always having SDR in their title, or different titles for different languages.

Core firmographics are wrong, such as headcount on LinkedIn not being accurate in industries with low LinkedIn adoption.

Kernel resolves these core challenges by using AI to establish account identity (not just 'fuzzy' match) and build hierarchies. Once the corporate structure is established, Kernel uses AI to extract custom data from all the structured and unstructured data about each entity.

The result is a view of each entity in the market that is a reflection of what a Cognism rep would look for, with a feedback mechanism that captures inaccuracies.

Summary:

Kernel enriches over 250,000 accounts with custom data, enabling Cognism to accurately prioritize accounts in the CRM and allocate leads across all markets.

Complete parent-child relationship mapping provides systematic identification of subsidiary relationships, establishing a clear sense of account identity and preventing duplicate outreach.

Kernel's custom enrichment enables Cognism to apply its complex account propensity scoring model to every entity in and outside of the CRM, ensuring that reps are always prospecting into the correct accounts with confidence.

This clean, enriched CRM foundation positions Cognism for future net-new account sourcing initiatives while enabling its RevOps team to manage a quarter-million account database with confidence.

Case Study →

“Systematically solving corporate hierarchies gave us greater clarity on our overall market view than we expected.”

Antoine Cornet

Head of Revenue Operations at Cognism

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Cognism uses Kernel to identify buying centers in corporate hierarchies and segment its global market using custom enrichment.

Cognism runs on Kernel

“Kernel’s ability to enrich accounts with custom insights at scale is unparalleled.”

Overview

“We take a focused and human approach to sales development. That starts with targeting the right accounts, and Kernel is integral to that.”

AI Cleaning & Hierarchies:

AI Custom Enrichment:

Summary:

“Systematically solving corporate hierarchies gave us greater clarity on our overall market view than we expected.”

Read more customer stories

Flatpay uses Kernel agents to research small merchants at massive scale

Remote relies on Kernel custom data to build pipeline

Ada got RevOps superpowers with Kernel’s custom data tooling

Hear from our other customers

“Kernel let me create stellar territories for 100+ reps in 1 week, including finding 15,000 brand-new accounts.”

“Kernel is critical to our sales strategy by ensuring everyone in the revenue function is aligned and focused on the right accounts of the right size.”

"With Kernel, we can be confident that our target market is well-defined and fully researched, allowing us to prioritise accounts by need, resulting in higher sales velocity."