ai-sales
(30)
Alexa Grabell
Alexa Grabell turned a sales-operations workaround into Pocus, helped name a category, and sold the company to Apollo. Her story is a case study in turning messy data into a clear operating thesis.
Salesloft
How an Atlanta software company turned the daily grind of sales outreach into a category - and bet its next chapter on AI that tells sellers what to do next.
FuseAI (YC W25)
FuseAI (operating as Fuse, tryfuse.ai) is a San Francisco-based, Y Combinator W25 startup building an AI-native sales platform for outbound revenue teams. It consolidates the fragmented GTM stack - contact data, waterfall enrichment, email and LinkedIn automation, deliverability infrastructure, a parallel dialer, and real-time buying signals - into one system where AI agents execute sales workflows from natural-language prompts. Founded in 2024 by CEO Saurav Bubber (former Deel GTM operator) and CTO Imogen Low (ex-SAP, co-founder of NWO.ai), Fuse aims to let one rep do the work of five.
Leadbay
Leadbay is a Y Combinator (F25) B2B sales startup building a domain-specific AI model that discovers and qualifies small-to-mid-sized business leads that traditional platforms like LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Apollo, and Clay can't find. Trained on market data, a company's own CRM/ERP history, and reps' instincts, Leadbay learns a team's Ideal Customer Profile and predicts who will buy next - delivering qualified leads directly inside agentic workflows and AI apps like Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot. Customers in data-scarce industries such as construction, hospitality, manufacturing, and B2B services report roughly 3-5x more qualified prospects. The company raised a $4.3M seed round led by Y Combinator in May 2026 and is based in San Francisco.
Sam Blond
Sam Blond is a go-to-market operator turned founder who built his reputation scaling startup sales teams. He was VP of Sales at Zenefits and Chief Revenue Officer at Brex, where he helped drive revenue from near zero to roughly $400M ARR. After an 18-month run as a partner at Founders Fund, he decided investing was not his fit and went back to operating. In 2026 he co-founded and now leads Monaco, an AI-native sales platform for startups, alongside his brother Brian Blond.
Attention
Attention is a New York-based AI platform for B2B revenue teams that goes beyond recording sales calls to actually executing the work that follows them. Founded in 2021 by Anis Bennaceur and Matthias Wickenburg, its AI agents transcribe and score conversations, auto-update the CRM, draft and send follow-ups, and orchestrate next steps across 200+ tools. The company raised a $30M Series B in June 2026 led by RTP Global, and serves 500+ customers including Abridge, Scale, BambooHR, and Preply.
Pocus
Pocus is an AI-powered product-led sales and revenue intelligence platform that helps go-to-market teams turn scattered product usage, CRM, and intent data into prioritized action. Founded in 2021 by Alexa Grabell and Isaac Pohl-Zaretsky, the San Francisco company tells sales reps which accounts to work, who to contact, and what to say by surfacing high-intent buying signals and generating AI account plans. Used by product-led companies including Asana, Canva, Miro, Monday.com and LaunchDarkly, Pocus raised $23M in seed and Series A funding backed by a16z and First Round Capital, and was acquired by Apollo.io in March 2026 to power Apollo's AI-native GTM operating system.
Ed Stevens
Ed Stevens is the founder and CEO of Scoot, a Dallas-based platform that positions itself as an AI sales environment where buyers, sellers, and live AI agents meet in real time. A serial entrepreneur with more than 25 years in retail and software, he previously founded and led the ecommerce fulfillment company Shopatron (acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2015) and served as COO of Kibo Commerce. Scoot began life as Preciate, an appreciation and relationship platform, before rebranding and raising a $12M Series A in early 2023. Stevens is also an author, board member, and investor.
Kareem Amin
Kareem Amin is the cofounder and CEO of Clay, a New York-based go-to-market platform that lets sales and marketing teams pull data from dozens of sources and run AI-powered personalized outreach at scale. After a seven-year search for product-market fit, Clay crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue and raised a $100M Series C in 2025 at a reported valuation above $3B. A second-time founder and McGill-trained engineer, Amin frames Clay as a creative tool that gives non-programmers the power of code, and talks openly about meditation, founder psychology, and building 'from a place of wholeness.'
1mind
1mind is a San Francisco AI company that builds photorealistic, voice-enabled 'Superhumans' - digital go-to-market teammates that combine a face, a voice and a product-trained brain to qualify leads, run live demos, join sales calls, handle objections and onboard customers 24/7 across websites, products, video calls and deal rooms. Founded by 6sense founder Amanda Kahlow and CTO Sachin Bhat, the company publicly launched in November 2025 with $40 million in total funding and is used by more than 45 B2B companies including HubSpot, ZoomInfo, Nutanix and New Relic.
Monaco
Monaco is an AI-native sales platform - billed as 'the first revenue engine for startups' - that replaces the usual patchwork of CRM, outbound tools, and pipeline software with a single system. Founded in 2025 by former Brex CRO Sam Blond alongside his brother Brian Blond, Abishek Viswanathan, and Malay Desai, Monaco builds a company's total addressable market, runs outbound, captures every call and email, and manages pipeline using AI agents paired with embedded human sales experts. It launched from stealth in February 2026 and, three months later, raised a $50M Series B led by Benchmark, pushing total funding past $85M.
Revenoid
Revenoid is a San Francisco and Carrollton, Texas-based AI company that builds a 'system of intelligence' for enterprise go-to-market teams. Formerly known as EvaBot, the company pivoted from AI-driven corporate gifting to a suite of AI sales agents that continuously monitor thousands of accounts for buying signals, prioritize them with a pain-based scoring engine called UrgencyIQ, and automate account research, prospecting briefs, meeting prep and personalized outreach directly inside existing GTM stacks like Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach and Salesloft. Founded by CEO Rabi Gupta, the company raised a $10.83M Series A led by Comcast Ventures in 2022.
Unify
Unify is a San Francisco-based AI go-to-market platform that automates "warm outbound" - combining intent signals, B2B prospecting data, AI research agents, and multi-channel email sequencing into a single workflow. Founded in 2023 by ex-Ramp outbound lead Austin Hughes and ex-Scale AI machine-learning engineer Connor Heggie, the company helps sales and growth teams reach buyers with personalized messages at the moment they are ready to buy. Customers include Cursor, Perplexity, Airwallex, Flock Safety, and Together AI. Unify has raised roughly $59M+ to date, capped by a $40M Series B led by Battery Ventures in mid-2025.
Warmly,
Warmly, is a San Francisco-based AI revenue orchestration platform built for SMB sales teams. It identifies anonymous website visitors at the person level, aggregates real-time buyer intent signals from multiple sources, and deploys AI agents to orchestrate personalized outreach across email, LinkedIn, and ads - all within seconds of a prospect showing interest. Founded in 2020 by four ex-Google engineers and backed by Felicis, NFX, and RTP Global with $21.5M raised, Warmly, turns the classic problem of 'who is on my website?' into a fully automated pipeline generation engine.
Zayd Ali
Zayd Ali is the founder and CEO of Valley, a New York based AI SDR that runs LinkedIn-first outbound for B2B teams by learning a company's product, cloning its best reps' voice, and booking sales meetings. He sold his first appointment-setting company for seven figures while still in high school, briefly studied at Columbia, joined Antler in 2022, and after starting and shelving a founder-VC network called Fish, pivoted into Valley. He took 136 investor meetings before closing a seed round that grew to roughly $3M from backers including Antler, Jason Calacanis, and General Catalyst's Fellows program.
Oliv AI
Oliv AI is a San Francisco software company building a team of AI agents for revenue organizations. Instead of asking sales reps to log calls, update the CRM, and prep for meetings, Oliv's agents capture deal intelligence automatically from every meeting, call, and email, then keep Salesforce and HubSpot accurate, score deals against methodologies like MEDDICC and BANT, forecast pipeline, and coach reps. The pitch is blunt: grow revenue without growing headcount by letting agents own responsibilities end-to-end, not just complete one-off tasks.
Landbase
Landbase is a San Francisco / Palo Alto-based agentic AI company building autonomous go-to-market (GTM) technology for B2B teams. Its flagship GTM-1 Omni is a domain-specific, multi-agent action model trained on tens of millions of B2B campaigns that automates the repetitive work of sales and marketing - prospecting, enrichment, campaign creation, multi-channel outreach and optimization - and claims 4-7x higher conversion than manually built campaigns. Founded in 2023 by former AppDirect co-CEO Daniel Saks alongside veterans from OysterHR and EverString, Landbase has raised about $42.5M to date, including a $30M Series A co-led by Ashton Kutcher's Sound Ventures.
Daniel Saks
Daniel Saks is the co-founder and CEO of Landbase, a San Francisco agentic-AI company building GTM-1 Omni, an action model purpose-built to automate B2B go-to-market work. He previously co-founded and co-led AppDirect, the subscription-commerce platform that became a unicorn. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and McGill graduate, Saks traces his obsession with helping small businesses survive to his family's century-old furniture store in Niagara Falls, which closed during the Great Recession.
Reza Javan
Reza Javan is the CEO and co-founder of Telescope, a London-based AI prospecting platform that automates B2B outbound across email and LinkedIn. Before he sold software to salespeople, he was Dr. Reza Rezaei Javan, an Oxford DPhil microbiologist who sequenced thousands of pneumococcal genomes and discovered new families of antimicrobial peptides. He swapped the lab bench for a startup at Entrepreneur First's LD17 cohort, where Telescope was born in 2021. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Soma Capital and Entrepreneur First.
Close CRM
Close is a bootstrapped, profitable sales CRM built for small and mid-sized teams that want to spend less time on admin and more time actually selling. Founded in 2013 out of a San Francisco sales agency, it combines pipeline management, built-in calling, email, and SMS into one platform - no integrations required. With $17M+ ARR and a fully remote team across 40+ countries, Close has grown almost entirely without venture capital, making it one of the more unusual success stories in SaaS.
Apollo.io
Apollo.io is an AI-powered go-to-market platform that combines a 275M+ contact B2B database with sales engagement, deal management, and conversation intelligence. It helps revenue teams find buyers, automate outreach, and close deals from a single workspace.
Mindtickle
Mindtickle is a SaaS revenue enablement platform that helps enterprise sales teams ramp faster, coach smarter, and close more. Founded in Pune in 2011 and now headquartered in San Francisco, the company turned the messy art of sales training into a data-backed system used by Fortune 500 companies, then layered agentic AI on top with its 2026 ElevateOS launch.
Nooks
Nooks is an AI Sales Assistant Platform (ASAP) that automates the grind of outbound sales - parallel dialing, prospect research, call coaching, and follow-up - so reps can spend more time having real conversations and less time leaving voicemails. Founded by three Stanford classmates in 2020 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company has raised $70M, including a $43M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins, and counts Seismic, Greenhouse, Brex, Deel, and HubSpot among its customers.
Dan Lee
Dan Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nooks, an AI Sales Assistant Platform that automates the manual busywork of sales development reps so they can focus on the human side of selling. Born in Manhattan and raised in New Jersey, Lee studied AI at Stanford (BS '21, MS '22), did ML stints at Scale AI and Cerebras Systems, and co-founded Nooks in 2020 with Stanford classmates Rohan Suri and Nikhil Cheerla. The company has raised $70 million in total funding, including a $43M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins in October 2024, and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 AI honoree in 2025.
Deepak Diwakar
Deepak Diwakar is the Co-Founder and COO of Mindtickle, the AI-powered revenue enablement platform that became a $1.2B unicorn in 2021. An IIT Bombay computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at PubMatic, Diwakar built Mindtickle's technology infrastructure from the ground up, helping transform how enterprise sales teams learn, practice, and perform. Under his watch, Mindtickle raised $281M in total funding, hit $118M+ in revenue, and earned recognition as a Forrester Wave Leader in Revenue Enablement Platforms.
Mukunda S
Mukunda Srinivasagowda is a seasoned technologist and Co-Founder of SuperAGI, a Palo Alto-based AI company building a full-stack agentic intelligence platform. With over 13 years spanning Amazon, Zomato, and fintech unicorn Navi, he co-built SuperAGI from the ground up in 2023 alongside CEO Ishaan Bhola. The company's open-source autonomous agent framework earned 17,500+ GitHub stars, attracted a $10 million Series A led by Jan Koum's secretive Newlands VC, and spawned a suite of AI-native products including SuperSales, SuperMarketing, and SuperCoder - all targeting the shift from LLMs that generate content to agents that actually take action.
Nishant Mungali
Nishant Mungali is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Mindtickle, the AI-powered revenue enablement platform that became a unicorn in 2021. An IIT Guwahati-trained designer and engineer, he co-founded Mindtickle in 2011 alongside Krishna Depura, Mohit Garg, and Deepak Diwakar after experimenting with online gamification through a group called TeraMeraIdea. Mungali has been the product and design force behind Mindtickle's evolution from a gamified onboarding tool to a $1.2 billion platform serving over 2,000 enterprises globally with AI-powered sales coaching, training, and readiness capabilities.
SuperAGI
SuperAGI is a Palo Alto-based AI company building autonomous agents that run real work - sales outreach, software engineering, marketing, support - on a single platform. Founded by Ishaan Bhola and Mukunda NS, it began as an open-source agent framework on GitHub and grew into a 25+ app super-platform used by SMB and enterprise teams, backed by $10M Series A from Jan Koum's Newlands VC.
Matt Curl
Matt Curl is the CEO of Apollo.io, the AI-native go-to-market platform approaching $200M ARR with nearly 100,000 paying customers. A career operator who scaled companies from seed to exit at Fivestars and led product launches at Checkr before joining Apollo as COO in 2024, Curl was elevated to CEO in February 2026 after effectively running the company for a year. His thesis: AI should not merely recommend - it should act.
Abhijit Mitra
Abhijit Mitra is the chief executive of Outreach, the Seattle-based sales execution platform used by Cisco, McKesson, Okta, SAP, Siemens and Verizon. A self-described technologist with more than two decades of product leadership at Oracle, SAP, ServiceNow and Commure, he was elevated from President of Product & Technology to CEO in September 2024, succeeding co-founder Manny Medina. He is reorienting the company around agentic AI for revenue teams.