There is an old, slightly cynical truth about the business of selling software to help you sell things: the software gets paid whether or not you ever sell anything. You buy the seats, you buy the credits, you buy the annual plan, and then it is entirely your problem whether any of it turns into a customer. The vendor has been paid. The vendor is happy. You are on a call with your sales team asking why the pipeline is empty.
Kular, a London company founded in 2021, decided this was a strange arrangement and mostly stopped doing it. Its pitch is that it will run your outbound sales - the emails, the LinkedIn messages, the follow-ups - and it will only charge you when the thing actually works. A positive reply costs something. A booked meeting costs a bit more. Everything upstream of that, the sending and the guessing and the A/B testing, is Kular's problem, not yours. The first lead is free. There is no minimum, and you can leave whenever you like.
Why this is more interesting than it sounds
Pricing is not usually the exciting part of a technology company. But pricing is where a company tells you what it actually believes about its own product. If you charge per seat, you are betting that your customer will keep the seats whether or not they work, because switching is annoying. If you charge per result, you are betting that your product produces results, reliably enough that you would rather be paid for those than for access. That is a much scarier bet, and Kular has organized its entire business around it.
The mechanism underneath is fairly standard modern AI plumbing, executed with some care. Kular reads your website to figure out what you sell and who might want it. It drafts campaigns using practices distilled from millions of sent emails. Then it runs continuous experiments - subject lines, send times, phrasing - because the unglamorous variables are the ones that actually move reply rates. It also warms up mailboxes and refreshes domains so the emails land in inboxes rather than spam folders, which is the kind of tedious infrastructure work that everybody needs and nobody wants to think about.
“Real leads, not just activity - you only pay for success.”
- Kular, on its own pricing page
The part where it clones your voice
Where it gets genuinely strange is voice. Kular will clone your voice and use it to leave personalized LinkedIn voice notes, in multiple languages, some of which you may not speak. It runs website voice agents and automated sales calls that sound like you. This is either the future of authentic outreach or a small ethical puzzle wrapped in a product feature, and reasonable people can hold both views at once. What is not in dispute is that voice notes get responses, and Kular has decided to industrialize the feeling of a personal touch.
There is also a quieter, cleverer product called Website Visitors, which looks at the anonymous traffic already arriving at your site - traffic you are probably already paying for through ads and content - identifies who those people are, researches them, and reaches out on its own. The pricing here is pay-as-you-go, around thirty cents per identified visitor. It is the sort of thing that makes you wonder why your existing website was just sitting there, quietly failing to introduce you to the people standing in your own lobby.
Who is behind it
The company was co-founded by Nelson Jones, who studied law at Oxford and started his first business in his final year before deciding, sensibly, that he preferred building companies to litigating them, and Saaras Mehan, a Cambridge computer scientist with a patented machine learning algorithm and a resume that includes Microsoft Research, Goldman Sachs, and Autodesk. The broader team is drawn from MIT, IIT, Cambridge, and Oxford, which is the sort of sentence a company includes in its about page and which, in this case, appears to be true.
Kular went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch and is backed by Entrepreneur First and Acequia Capital, plus a scattering of angels who were early in Stripe, OpenSea, and Ironclad. It now generates leads for more than a thousand companies, mostly founders and small B2B businesses who want a sales development team without the overhead of hiring one. The company describes its own culture as radically honest and transparent, and it runs a hiring process short enough - about two hours - that the honesty seems at least partly load-bearing.
None of this guarantees anything. Outcome-based pricing is a wonderful promise until a difficult customer in a difficult market produces few outcomes, at which point Kular is doing free work and someone has to have an awkward conversation about fit. But that is precisely the point of the model: the awkward conversation is Kular's to have, not yours. In a category built on selling activity and calling it progress, a company that only gets paid for progress is, at minimum, an honest experiment worth watching.
