ai-sdr
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Live Chat Software Grew Up and Learned to Sell
Eight companies - from a free widget called tawk.to to Salesforce's new AI seller Piper - are fighting over the little box in the corner of your screen. The chat bubble stopped answering questions and started closing deals.
Birdeye and Qualified Took Opposite Roads to the Same AI Future
One crossed $100 million in revenue while barely touching venture money. The other got scooped up by Salesforce. Both are betting the future of marketing belongs to software that works on its own.
Xiaohan Shen
Xiaohan Shen is the co-founder and CEO of Coldreach (YC W23), a San Francisco startup that uses AI to find ready-to-buy leads by watching public buying signals and to personalize cold outbound at scale. A University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science and data science grad, he calls himself an 'outbound nerd' after writing more than 1,000 cold emails by hand at his first startup, EasyJobs, which he and co-founder Hankel Bao grew to 20,000 monthly active users before pivoting into the tooling problem they lived themselves.
Coldreach
Coldreach is a Y Combinator-backed (W23) AI sales development platform that helps B2B teams find companies that are ready to buy right now. Instead of blasting cold emails to random lists, teams describe what a buying signal looks like for their product in plain language, and Coldreach monitors 113M+ companies across job postings, news, LinkedIn activity, SEC filings, hiring changes and more, 24/7. When a match fires, the AI researches the account and writes personalized outreach that references the specific event - which the company says produces meaningfully higher reply and booking rates than spray-and-pray outbound.
Crustdata
Crustdata is a San Francisco company that supplies real-time company and people data through clean APIs and webhooks built for AI agents. Founded in 2024 and part of Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch, it pulls live data from many primary sources so AI SDRs, recruiting tools, and investment platforms can find the right person, watch for job changes and funding rounds, and act on fresh signals instead of stale databases.
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.
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.
Valley
Valley is a New York-based AI startup building a single, autonomous outbound engine that acts as an AI sales development rep (SDR). It ingests your product, clones your voice, researches each prospect, and sends hyper-personalized LinkedIn outreach - identifying website visitors, enriching contacts, scoring intent, and booking sales meetings while human reps do other work. Founded by Zayd Ali, who exited a prior sales company at 18, Valley pitches itself as 'revenue in a box' for modern B2B teams, at roughly $395/month per seat versus a five-figure human SDR.
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.
Lyzr AI
Lyzr AI is an enterprise agent-infrastructure company that helps banks, insurers, and other regulated organizations move AI agents from proof-of-concept to production. Its open-core Agent Framework bakes Safe AI and Responsible AI modules into the core architecture, while products like Agent Studio and a roster of named agents (Jazon the AI SDR, Skott the AI marketer) let teams build, govern, and deploy autonomous agents inside their own firewall or VPC. Backed by Accenture and valued at $250M, Lyzr positions itself as the trusted layer between large language models and the compliance-bound enterprise.
Kraig Swensrud
Kraig Swensrud is the co-founder and CEO of Qualified, the AI-powered pipeline generation platform built natively on Salesforce. A serial entrepreneur and former Salesforce CMO, he has founded three companies - Kieden (acquired by Salesforce in 2006), GetFeedback (acquired by Campaign Monitor in 2014, later by SurveyMonkey), and Qualified (acquired by Salesforce in April 2026 for an estimated multi-hundred million valuation). At Qualified, he built the category of conversational marketing and agentic AI for B2B enterprises, raising $163M in funding and growing to ~260 employees before the acquisition completed a full-circle return to Salesforce.
Qualified
Qualified is the San Francisco company that built Piper, the AI SDR agent that nurtures and converts website visitors into qualified pipeline for B2B enterprises. Born inside the Salesforce ecosystem and now being absorbed back into it, Qualified turned the corporate website from a brochure into a 24/7 sales floor.
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.
11x
11x builds autonomous AI 'digital workers' for go-to-market teams - software agents like Alice, an AI sales development rep, and Jordan, a multilingual AI phone rep. Founded in 2022 and based in San Francisco, the startup raised a $50M Series B from Andreessen Horowitz in late 2024 at a roughly $350M valuation. After turbulence around customer claims and culture, founder Hasan Sukkar stepped down as CEO in May 2025 and CTO Prabhav Jain took over.