He built an AI that does the one thing salespeople rarely promise: it only gets paid when it actually finds you a customer.
Most software bills you on the first of the month whether it helped you or not. Kular waits. The London company Nelson Jones runs as co-founder and CEO sends emails, fires off LinkedIn messages, and leaves voice notes in a clone of your own voice - and the meter starts only when a real, qualified lead lands in your inbox.
That is the whole bet. Kular is an AI lead generator for the roughly two million "normal" B2B businesses that need customers but have never had the time, the data, or the patience to run modern outbound sales. The plumber's supply company. The boutique consultancy. The kind of firm that does not have venture money in the bank or software margins to burn on experiments.
Nelson's promise to them is almost rude in its simplicity: click one button, and Kular handles strategy, infrastructure, and execution. It reads your website to work out who you should target. It warms up the mailboxes. It finds the right person and writes to them at the right moment. If nothing comes back, you owe nothing.
Outbound sales is a strange thing to give away on credit. It demands upfront investment in time, skills, data and infrastructure - exactly the resources that venture-backed software companies have in abundance and corner shops do not. By absorbing that cost itself and only invoicing on success, Kular flips the usual risk. The customer no longer gambles on a tool. The tool gambles on the customer. That single inversion is the reason a thousand companies have let an algorithm speak in their name.
Kular's grandparent test: "Kular makes outbound so easy your grandparents can run outbound campaigns at scale." If your nan can't do it, it isn't simple enough.
Role: Co-founder & CEO, Kular
Based: London, United Kingdom
Studied: Law, University of Oxford
Backed by: Y Combinator, Entrepreneur First, Acequia Capital
Batch: Y Combinator, Winter 2022
Nelson read law at Oxford. The expected next move was a training contract, a wood-panelled office, billable hours measured in six-minute slices. He had even interned at the global firm Dentons. The expected move is not the move he made.
In his final year, instead of revising for the bar, he started a business. In 2019 he founded Jean Jones Estate. The detail that matters here is not the company; it is the timing. He was building while everyone around him was credentialing.
In 2020 he went into sales at Luminance, the AI platform built for the legal profession. It was the perfect crossover for a law graduate with a commercial itch: he learned to sell artificial intelligence to sceptical lawyers, and he learned what it felt like when the technology actually delivered. Selling AI to the legal world is a special kind of training. Lawyers are paid to find the flaw in the argument, and a young salesperson learns fast that the only pitch that survives that scrutiny is one backed by a result you can point to.
It is tempting to read his early years as restlessness. A truer reading is appetite. Jean Jones Estate, the Luminance desk, the eventual leap into Entrepreneur First - each was a way of getting closer to the part he liked best, which was turning a cold introduction into a paying relationship. Kular is that instinct, scaled and automated.
In 2021 Nelson joined Entrepreneur First's London LD16 cohort - the talent-first program that pairs ambitious people before they have a company, and dares them to build one. There he met Saaras Mehan, a machine-learning scientist trained under Rob Mullins at Cambridge.
Saaras had patented his first machine-learning algorithm at nineteen, during a research internship at Autodesk. Nelson could sell and Saaras could build. They co-founded the company that became Kular.
"Build things people want. Do things that don't scale."
"You wouldn't leave potential customers sitting in your waiting room. So why would you leave them sitting on your website?"
"It was our entry point into the US market." - on what Y Combinator did for Kular
"Kular makes outbound so easy your grandparents can run outbound campaigns at scale."
The company did not arrive fully formed. It started as Kula, a marketplace meant to connect people with legal services. The model misfired - it produced low-quality leads and pushed lawyers into a race to the bottom on fees.
So they rebuilt it as an AI business-development associate for law firms, promising to "introduce lawyers to their perfect clients automatically" by combining fine-tuned language models with human feedback and public data from sources like SEC EDGAR and Companies House. By June 2023 that version had reached 100 customers across five continents, with a third of new business arriving through referrals.
Then came the bigger realisation. The thing they had built for lawyers worked for almost anyone who needed customers. Kula became Kular, and the niche tool for law firms became a general AI lead generator. The law degree was never wasted - it just turned out to be the first vertical, not the last.
$250 per delivered lead, reduced to $150 for YC alumni and referrals. Website visitors at $0.30 each. No minimum, no lock-in.
Y Combinator, Entrepreneur First and Acequia Capital, plus angels behind Ironclad, OpenSea and Stripe.
Founds his first business while still in his final year of law at Oxford.
Joins Luminance, the AI platform for the legal profession, in a sales role.
Joins the EF LD16 London cohort, meets Saaras Mehan, and co-founds the company that becomes Kular.
Goes through YC W22 - the company's "entry point into the US market."
As an AI business-development tool for law firms, hits 100 customers with a third arriving by referral.
Launches AI LinkedIn Voice Notes and Website Visitors; Kular now generates leads for over a thousand companies.
Outbound sales got crowded. Everyone is automating, which means the personal touch is the scarce thing again. Kular's answer is unsettling and clever in equal measure: it clones your voice and sends LinkedIn voice notes - in any language, to any prospect, anywhere in the world - with about fifteen seconds of setup.
Its newest trick watches your website. Kular Website Visitors quietly identifies the anonymous traffic landing on your site, researches each visitor, and where it makes sense, reaches out by email on its own. The waiting room never sits empty for long.
Across all of it runs the same spine: the company only makes money when you do. It is an uncomfortable way to build a business and a very persuasive way to sell one. It also forces a discipline most software never has to practise. When you cannot bill for activity, only for outcomes, every wasted email is your own money on the floor. The incentive to make the AI genuinely good is not a slogan on a wall - it is the difference between getting paid and not.
There is a quiet ambition tucked inside the voice-note feature, too. For decades, the businesses that could afford a polished outbound team had an unfair edge. A tool that lets a one-person consultancy leave a warm, personal-sounding voice note in flawless German or Japanese, at the price of a coffee, is not just a gimmick. It is a small act of redistribution in who gets to sound professional at scale.
When you tie your revenue directly to a customer's results, the bad weeks are very public. Nelson has said he'd post about "the highs and lows of directly correlating our revenue with the results we deliver." It is not the language of a founder hiding behind a dashboard.
In a hiring interview, a candidate once asked what Y Combinator had actually done for Kular. He didn't reach for a slogan. He said it was the entry point into the US - and within two years the company had built a six-person American team and crossed half its revenue across the Atlantic.
Two million B2B businesses in the US alone are locked out of a channel that works, simply because they lack the money, the data, and the infrastructure that funded startups take for granted. Nelson's ambition is to hand all of it to them through one button - and to be paid only when it pays off. Alignment as a business model, sold to the people the software industry usually forgets.