ai-sales
(42)
Rohan Suri and the Useful Art of Changing His Mind
The Nooks co-founder began as an AI engineer, volunteered to make the first sales calls, and discovered that the shortest route to a useful product runs straight through the customer’s working day.
Jesse Li Kept Calling It a Project. Then the Project Learned to Sell.
A rejected YC pitch, a seven-day rebuild and years of side projects led Jesse Li to Cedar. His real product may be the habit of beginning again.
ZoomInfo Knows Who’s Buying. Read the Fine Print.
The B2B data heavyweight has become an AI-powered operating layer for revenue teams. Its database can save hours; its quote, credits and renewal terms deserve a spreadsheet of their own.
Smartlead Built a Switchboard for the Cold-Email Factory
For agencies juggling dozens of domains, Smartlead turns cold outreach into one controllable machine. The machinery is capable, the pricing favors scale, and the operator still needs to watch every gauge.
Klenty Turned the Cold-Email Grind Into a Sales System - Now It Wants AI to Pick Up the Busywork
Three founders started by fixing a problem they had lived: one-to-one prospecting stops scaling, but indiscriminate automation burns the people you want to reach. Klenty’s decade-long bet is that the winning system sits between those two mistakes.
Ashok Kammara Left Derivatives for the Messy Math of a Ringing Phone
After 13 years in financial services, Klenty's founding marketer chose a less orderly ledger: the missed calls, burned numbers and human follow-ups that decide whether an outbound team works.
Four McDonald’s Rejections, One One-Way Ticket, and Saurav Bubber’s Sales-Software Bet
He once wanted a life on the golf course. Instead, a bank counter, a consulting desk and Deel’s crowded sales stack led him to FuseAI - and a distinctly operator-shaped idea of what AI should do for sellers.
Anis Bennaceur Is Teaching Sales Software to Finish the Job
A former startup rival became his co-founder. A neglected CRM became the clue. Now the Attention CEO is betting that the useful sales tool is the one that acts after everyone leaves the call.
Bosuk Han Is Rebuilding the Car Dealership From the Test Drive Up
The former BMW Korea manager spent years turning dealer activity into data. Now his company, EPIKAR, is taking that operating system from Seoul to American showrooms.
Austin Hughes Is Turning Outbound Sales Into a Product Problem
The Unify co-founder went from finance to product by following a simple instinct: shrink the experiment, watch the signal, and build distribution with the care usually reserved for software.
Amanda Kahlow Is Selling the Moment After Intent
She spent years teaching software to spot buyers before they raised a hand. Now the founder of 6sense and 1mind is testing what happens when the answer arrives before the sales handoff.
Centerfield Built a Customer-Acquisition Machine. Now It Wants to Own the Moment Before the Click
The Los Angeles company reaches shoppers through its own media network, routes intent through Dugout, and gets paid for measurable outcomes. Its latest bet is that the most valuable click may be the one an AI answer makes unnecessary.
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.