Mei Siauw

The Story

She gave sales reps back 6 hours a week - not with a motivational poster, but with a product. That's the whole thesis.

Mei Siauw did not stumble into sales technology. She watched, for ten years at Oracle, exactly how broken the prospecting loop was: reps copying contact data from one screen into another, chasing stale emails, building lists that were obsolete by the time they loaded. When she left Oracle in 2014, she had a very specific problem in mind.

LeadIQ launched in 2015. The pitch was deceptively plain - capture lead data from LinkedIn with a click, sync it to Salesforce without the copy-paste ritual. But the product that shipped in 2015 looks nothing like what exists today. Today, LeadIQ does account-based prospecting, real-time job-change tracking, AI-generated personalized outreach, CRM enrichment, and mobile number sourcing. Siauw spent a decade at Oracle learning what enterprise buyers actually need before they'd confess it to a salesperson.

Under her leadership, LeadIQ has raised $42M across four funding rounds, including a $30M Series B in October 2021 led by Cathay Innovation. The team operates fully remotely from 33+ countries. There is no headquarters, no central office, no Monday all-hands with bad lighting. The culture has to work on Slack and async video or it doesn't work at all - and 20,000+ sales professionals are evidence it works.

Buyers aren't looking to be sold to. They're looking to be understood.

- Mei Siauw, Co-founder & CEO, LeadIQ

What makes Siauw unusual in the crowded sales-tech landscape is the discipline she brings to data. The category is littered with platforms selling contact databases that are 60% wrong. LeadIQ bets on freshness and verification - real-time signal tracking, job-change alerts, and multi-source enrichment. That's not a feature. It's a philosophical stance: garbage data wastes everyone's time, especially the buyer's.

Her original investor was Jason Calacanis, who hosts This Week in Startups and has a habit of backing founders before they have much to show. Calacanis appeared on his own podcast with Siauw in 2021 to dissect LeadIQ's approach to inside sales. By that point, the company had quietly grown to a point where Cathay Innovation led a $30M round - not because LeadIQ had the loudest PR, but because the growth metrics were hard to argue with.

Career

From Indonesia to Oracle to Outbound

Early Career

Moves from Indonesia to the US. Earns a BS in Computer Science at Cornell University. Early stint at Autodesk.

2004-2014

Decade at Oracle USA in product management - rises to Group Manager, driving product strategy and go-to-market for ERP Cloud products. Watches the prospecting problem up close.

2011-2013

MBA from Wharton School (Marketing & Strategic Management) while still at Oracle. Adds business-model thinking to a CS foundation.

2013-2014

Co-founds TotSpot Inc. - a mobile marketplace for children's fashion. The company is acquired by Poshmark. First exit. First proof.

2015

Launches LeadIQ with co-founder Angelo Huang (CTO). Jason Calacanis writes the first check. The mission: kill the copy-paste prospecting loop forever.

2018

Speaks at Empower B2B. LeadIQ is now a recognized voice in the sales intelligence conversation, not just a scrappy browser extension.

Oct 2021

Closes $30M Series B led by Cathay Innovation. Revenue growth attracted institutional capital. TechCrunch covers the round.

2024

LeadIQ reaches $7.7M ARR (up 26% YoY). Team grows to 131 employees in 33+ countries. Platform serves 20,000+ sales professionals.

2025

Partners with Nooks to enhance mobile data accuracy for enterprise sales teams. The platform keeps expanding its signal layer.

By The Numbers

LeadIQ at a Glance

$42M Total Funding Raised

$30M Series B (Oct 2021)

$7.7M Annual Revenue (2024)

26% YoY Revenue Growth

Funding History

Seed / Early

~$2M

Series A

~$10M

Series B

$30M

Lead Investors: Jason Calacanis (angel) ◆ Eight Roads Ventures (Series A) ◆ Cathay Innovation (Series B, Oct 2021)

The Builder

What a Decade at Oracle Actually Teaches You

Oracle product management in the 2000s and early 2010s was a specific kind of training. Enterprise software moved in cycles measured in quarters, not sprints. Customer feedback arrived through thick requirement documents. The gap between what buyers said they needed and what they actually did in the product was wide enough to drive a truck through.

Siauw watched that gap for ten years. She watched sales reps log into four different tools to complete a single prospecting task. She watched data hygiene get treated as someone else's problem. She watched personalization mean "change the first name in the template." When she finally left to start TotSpot in 2013 - a children's fashion marketplace that would later sell to Poshmark - it was her first test of building from scratch, not inside an institution.

LeadIQ was the real thing. Founded in 2015 with Angelo Huang as CTO, the early product was a Chrome extension that pulled contact data from LinkedIn and dropped it directly into Salesforce. Simple, fast, actually useful. The kind of tool a salesperson would pay for out of their own pocket if the company didn't.

The deeper bet was on workflow. Siauw kept asking: what slows reps down before the first call? Data lookup. Email formatting. CRM entry. Figuring out who changed jobs last month at a target account. LeadIQ started eating those minutes one by one. By the time Cathay Innovation led the $30M Series B, the platform was doing real-time job-change tracking, multi-source contact enrichment, AI-generated email personalization, and direct integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Outreach.

The founder's journey is one of resiliency. Keep going especially when times are tough.

- Mei Siauw

The remote-first structure was not a pandemic pivot. LeadIQ had been building a globally distributed team from early on - partly because the talent Siauw wanted was not all in San Francisco, and partly because she understood that proximity is a weak substitute for process. The company operates across 33+ countries. The playbooks have to be written down. The culture has to survive a twelve-hour time zone gap.

Her management philosophy borrows from her own immigrant story: you do not get to assume that everyone around you shares your context. You have to over-communicate. You have to be specific. And you have to hire people who are motivated enough to figure things out without being in the same room.

Cornell University

BS, Computer Science

Ithaca, NY

Wharton School

MBA - Marketing & Strategic Management

2011-2013 — Philadelphia, PA

Organizations

LeadIQ - Co-founder & CEO (2015-present)
TotSpot Inc. - Co-founder & CEO (acq. by Poshmark)
Oracle USA - Group Manager, Product (2004-2014)
Autodesk - Early career role

Key Moments

The Panels

The First Check

Jason Calacanis, angel investor and host of This Week in Startups, wrote the first check into LeadIQ. He later had Siauw on his podcast to dissect inside sales strategy. The relationship started before the metrics existed to justify it.

The Fashion Exit

Before LeadIQ, Siauw co-founded TotSpot - a mobile marketplace for children's fashion. It was acquired by Poshmark. An unlikely first act, but it taught her consumer product instincts that still show up in LeadIQ's UX.

The $30M Bet

Cathay Innovation led the October 2021 Series B at $30M. Alumni Ventures, Eight Roads, Draper Associates, and Fresco Capital all participated. TechCrunch ran the headline. The product had earned the capital quietly.

33 Countries, 0 Offices

LeadIQ's 131-person team is spread across 33+ countries with no central headquarters. In a category full of hybrid promises, Siauw actually built the infrastructure to make async culture work at scale.

The 6-Hour Argument

LeadIQ's product saves the average sales rep 6 hours per week. That's 312 hours per year - roughly 7.8 full work weeks returned to quota-carrying work. Siauw leads with this number because it's specific enough to be real.

The Oracle Decade

Ten years inside Oracle's product management structure taught Siauw what enterprise buyers actually need - as opposed to what they say in discovery calls. The gap between the two is where LeadIQ lives.

Watch & Listen

Mei Siauw in Conversation

YouTube — Sales Talk for CEOs Build an Outbound Sales Motion Early with Mei Siauw

YouTube — Interview Scaling a Startup: Sales and Growth Strategy

This Week in Startups — Jason Calacanis Inside Sales Strategy with Mei Siauw (Apr 2021)

The Details

Things Worth Knowing

🌐

She speaks three languages: English (professional), Indonesian (native), and Chinese (working). The global team of 33+ countries is not a coincidence.

🔨

Her first startup was in children's fashion - about as far from B2B SaaS as you can get. TotSpot was acquired by Poshmark. The instinct to build transferable products showed up early.

⏱

LeadIQ gives the average sales rep back 6 hours per week. Over a year, that's 312 hours - or roughly 7.8 full work weeks returned to actual selling.

🏫

CS at Cornell before MBA at Wharton. The combination of hard technical training and business-model fluency is rare - and it shows in how she talks about product and revenue in the same sentence.

📈

She spent 10 years at Oracle before jumping into startups - longer than most founders spend at any company before their leap. She left knowing exactly which problem she wanted to solve.

🏠

LeadIQ has 131 employees across 33+ countries with no central office. Coordination runs entirely through async tools and intentional culture - not proximity.

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