He taught a machine to listen to sales calls so managers wouldn't have to.
New York · AI sales platform · ex-AWS, ex-RapidSOS
Ricky Pellegrini. The product guy who decided
the best sales advice was already on the tape.
Every closed deal leaves a paper trail. Not in the CRM, where reps file their tidy summaries, but in the messy back-and-forth of the call itself: the objection nobody logged, the pause before the discount, the question that flipped a skeptic. Riccardo Pellegrini built a company on the conviction that the answers to better selling are already sitting in those conversations. The job was never to invent advice. It was to go find it.
That company is Knode.ai, and Pellegrini - Ricky to most people - is its co-founder and CEO. Knode is an AI sales-management platform based in New York. It listens to sales conversations at scale, scores them, and turns the behaviors that win into playbooks the rest of the team can actually run. The pitch to a sales leader is almost cheeky: stop watching call recordings. Let the system surface what matters, then go coach.
The scale is the point. Knode has analyzed more than a million calls for high-growth teams. A manager can't sit through a million calls. A manager can't even sit through ten a day without the week disappearing. Pellegrini's wager is that the bottleneck in sales has never been effort or talent - it's visibility. You can't fix what you can't see, and most of what happens in a sales org happens out of earshot.
He came to this problem the long way around, through product. Before Knode, Pellegrini was Head of Product for AWS Data Exchange at Amazon - the part of the cloud business concerned with how organizations buy, sell, and move data. Before that he was VP of Product at RapidSOS, the emergency-response technology company that raised somewhere north of $280 million, where he ran product management, strategy, and the UX and UI teams. Both jobs were about the same underlying thing: taking something invisible and making it usable.
Knode was founded in 2023, and Pellegrini didn't build it alone. His co-founders are Henry Katz, the CTO, and Nicholas Horelik. Between the three of them they carry a resume that reads like a tour of hard technical problems - data infrastructure, emergency systems, weather and climate modeling. They raised roughly $7 million from a roster that includes ACME Capital, G20 Ventures, TTV Capital, Picus Capital, and Global Founders Capital, among others. Then they pointed all that firepower at one of the least glamorous, most universal problems in business: why most salespeople never get coached.
The bet is starting to find allies. In early 2026, Force Management - one of the better-known names in sales methodology - announced a strategic partnership with Knode to drive measurable behavior change through personalized, AI-powered coaching. It's a telling pairing. Force Management has spent years teaching humans how to sell. Knode is building the machine that checks whether the lesson stuck.
You want people who know what to challenge and when - and who can actually offer a better alternative, not just punch holes in the plan. Riccardo Pellegrini, on who he hires
Begins as an investment banking analyst, then circles through venture capital and finance, including time at Cue Ball Capital.
Takes the chief executive seat - an early turn at running the whole thing rather than advising on it.
Leads product, strategy, and design for the emergency-response company that raised ~$281M. Stakes don't get much higher than calls for help.
At Amazon, owns the product for how the world buys and sells data. The invisible plumbing of the data economy.
With Henry Katz and Nicholas Horelik, sets out to make B2B sales scientific and scalable.
A heavyweight of sales methodology signs on to drive measurable behavior change through Knode's AI coaching.
Question the strategy, but do it because you've thought about it - not out of reflex.
Criticism alone is cheap. Pair every objection with an alternative worth choosing.
Once the call is made, everyone rows in the same direction. No quiet resistance.
Knode identifies the moves that actually win deals and embeds them across the team, instead of grading reps on activity counts.
Every call gets read and scored, so a manager sees performance quantitatively - not from the three calls they happened to overhear.
New sellers learn from the patterns of the best, compressing the slow, expensive climb to quota.
Personalized, specific feedback delivered to a whole org - the thing managers always want to do and never have time for.
As the conversations change, so do the recommended behaviors. The playbook is a living document, not a binder on a shelf.
Built for security-conscious buyers, with the access controls and data protections large sales orgs require.