Company Profile • SaaS & Go-To-Market
Rivia.AI Hands the Product Demo to the Buyer
A Bengaluru startup from Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch is betting that the best salesperson for your software is the software itself - clicked through by the prospect, minus the call.
Every business software company runs into the same wall. A prospect lands on the website, reads a few lines about dashboards and integrations, watches a slick two-minute video, and then leaves - still not sure what the thing actually does. The next step is usually a form, a wait, and a sales call scheduled for Tuesday. Most people never make it to Tuesday.
Rivia.AI, a startup founded in Bengaluru and shaped in Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch, was built around a simple observation about that wall: the fastest way to convince someone your product works is to let them use it. Not a recording of someone else using it. Not a diagram. The real thing, or something close enough that the difference stops mattering.
The company's pitch is that a marketing or sales team should be able to take their live product, capture a working copy of it, add a few labels and a spoken explanation, and publish it as an interactive demo - all in the time it takes to write a decent email. No engineering ticket. No waiting on a staging environment. The buyer clicks through it alone, at their own pace, and Rivia quietly records where they lingered and where they left.
The IdeaLoom, but you can touch it
When Rivia.AI first launched through YC, the founders described it as interactive videos for product demos - a way to combine the personal, talking-head warmth of a Loom recording with the hands-on feel of a real product tour. The framing was deliberate. Product videos, they argued, are watched passively; nobody remembers the fourteenth SaaS explainer they scrolled past. Traditional click-through demos, on the other hand, tend to bury the viewer in tooltips and text until they give up.
The workaround is a Chrome extension. A user points it at their own application and it captures a pixel-perfect clone - the layout, the buttons, the data on screen - as an interactive front end rather than a flat screenshot. Inside Rivia's editor, the team can then record a narration, drop in guided steps, and stitch multiple screens into a single flow. The finished demo goes out as a shareable link or gets embedded straight into a webpage.
How a Rivia demo gets made
That is the trick worth stealing for anyone building in a crowded category: pick the one chore everybody hates - here, waiting on engineering to build a demo environment - and remove it entirely. The feature list came later. The wedge was the annoyance.
Who It Is ForThe team that owns the funnel
Rivia.AI sells to marketing, sales, and demand-generation teams at business software companies - the people responsible for turning a curious visitor into a qualified lead. Its own site references more than twenty companies using the platform and name-checks large institutions among them, including Google, the Bombay Stock Exchange, and FIS. The through-line is that these are teams who need to show a product to a lot of strangers without personally walking each one through it.
For a demand-generation lead, an interactive demo is a lead magnet that qualifies people as it entertains them. For a sales rep, it is a leave-behind that keeps selling after the call ends. For a product-led company that wants users to try before they buy, it is the first-touch experience that decides whether a stranger sticks around.
Over time the product widened beyond standalone demos. Rivia added guided product tours for onboarding, actionable checklists that nudge new users toward their first win, and in-product banners for announcements. The analytics layer tracks engagement across all of it - which steps convert, where people drop off - so a team can tell the difference between a demo that dazzles and one that actually moves someone forward.
The MarketA crowded room, and a cheaper seat
Interactive demos have quietly become a real software category, with venture-backed leaders like Walnut, Storylane, Navattic, and Reprise all chasing the same buyers. It is not a blue ocean. Rivia's answer is not to out-feature the incumbents but to undercut them on price and friction - the company openly publishes comparisons pitching itself as the affordable alternative to Walnut and its peers.
The interactive-demo field
| Player | Known for | Rivia's angle |
|---|---|---|
| Walnut | Enterprise incumbent | Lower cost, less setup |
| Storylane | Ease of use, formats | All-in-one lifecycle |
| Navattic | Clean HTML demos | Pixel-perfect capture |
| Reprise | Heavy customization | Built in minutes |
There is a strategic logic to the affordability play. The buyers most desperate for a self-serve demo are often smaller teams without the budget for enterprise seats - the exact segment the biggest platforms price out. Rivia is comfortable sitting there. Being cheaper is not a temporary discount; for a lean team, it is the whole go-to-market.
Why buyers drop off - and where a demo helps
The BuildersTwo founders, one narrow bet
Rivia.AI is the work of two co-founders. Samay Jain serves as chief executive and is the public face of the company - his LinkedIn handle, tellingly, reads “samaystops4no1,” and he keeps a personal site under the wry title “Samay Samjhayega,” roughly, “time will explain.” Prabal Agarwal is the chief technology officer, responsible for the capture engine that makes the whole thing feel like magic when it works and like a bug report when it does not.
The team is small - reported at a handful of people - and still hiring engineers in Bengaluru. That size is not incidental to the story. A two-founder company taking on venture-funded American competitors has to be ruthless about what it builds. The discipline shows in the product: rather than sprawling, Rivia keeps circling the same core loop of capture, narrate, share, measure.
On funding, the public record is modest and a little fuzzy - reported figures for its seed and YC backing range from roughly $59,000 to $130,000, raised around September 2021. Rivia has not been a headline-grabbing fundraiser, which fits a company that reads as product-first and quietly bootstrapped in temperament, even with the YC stamp on it.
The BusinessSelling the tool that sells the tool
The model itself is straightforward business-software economics: Rivia.AI charges teams a subscription to build, publish, and analyze their demos, with the value scaling as a company runs more flows and folds the engagement data back into its CRM. That is where the integrations earn their keep - Rivia connects to more than a dozen tools including HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Mixpanel, Segment, Slack, and Zapier, so a demo does not sit in a silo. When a prospect clicks through a walkthrough, that signal can land in the same system a sales rep already lives in.
The expertise on display is narrower than the marketing suggests, and that is a compliment. Cloning a live web application faithfully enough that a stranger cannot tell the difference is a genuinely hard engineering problem - browsers are messy, layouts break, state is fragile. Most of Rivia's technical effort goes into making that capture reliable, because everything downstream depends on it looking real. A demo that renders wrong is worse than no demo at all.
Where It FitsThe first-touch layer of PLG
Step back and Rivia.AI is chasing a specific, structural shift in how software gets bought. Buyers increasingly want to evaluate a product before they will talk to a human. That behavior created a gap in the funnel: the moment a stranger first tries your software, unguided, on their own. Product-led growth depends on that moment going well. Rivia is trying to own it.
Whether it wins the category or not, the underlying premise is hard to argue with in ten years' terms. Software demos are drifting from a scheduled event, gated by a sales calendar, to an always-available experience a buyer drives themselves. A tool that makes that experience cheap and quick to produce is aimed at a durable change, not a fad. The open questions are the usual ones for a small team in a funded market: distribution, staying power, and whether “affordable” can grow into “indispensable.”
For now, Rivia.AI's answer is the same one it started with. Stop telling people your product works. Hand them the keys and get out of the way.