b2b-sales
(41)
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.
Commsor Bet That Your Network Was the Product
The community-software startup spent six years arguing that trust, not cold email, is how companies actually grow - then folded the idea, and itself, into The Swarm.
Rasayel Bet the Company on WhatsApp Closing B2B Deals
Founded by a bootstrapper in a south Ireland fishing town, Rasayel turns WhatsApp into a sales channel that syncs with HubSpot - and it did it without raising a dollar.
Commsor
It started as software for online communities and became the company that told sales teams to stop cold-calling and start asking friends. The dinosaur was optional; the warm intro was the point.
Groove Made Salesforce Do the Selling Reps Hated Most
Groove built the first sales engagement platform that lived inside Salesforce instead of syncing to it. A decade later, after a $45 million round and a deal with Clari, the bet on being native still defines the category.
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.
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.
Mercura
Mercura is a Munich-based YC W25 startup building AI software that turns messy sales requests - emails, tender specs, phone calls - into structured, spec-compliant quotes and orders for industrial distributors and manufacturers. It reads unstructured inquiries, matches them to catalog products, prioritizes margin, and pushes the result straight into a customer's ERP.
Sailes
Sailes is a New York and Kansas City based AI company that builds autonomous, personality-driven "Sailebots" to automate the entire B2B sales prospecting lifecycle - from finding contacts and researching accounts to writing outreach and booking meetings. Founded in 2018 by Nick Smith, the venture-backed firm trained its own sales-focused AI model to replace roughly a dozen point solutions, and its Sailebots are deployed across dozens of countries for enterprise and mid-market sales teams at companies including Staples, Wiley, and Rogers Electric.
SPOTIO
SPOTIO is a mobile-first field sales execution platform built for outside sales teams that knock doors, work territories, and sell face to face. Founded in 2014 in Addison, Texas by CEO Trey Gibson, it combines territory mapping, route optimization, GPS activity tracking, lead and pipeline management, multi-channel outreach, and performance analytics in one system, plus a DASH AI co-pilot and native syncs with Salesforce, HubSpot and thousands of apps. It gives managers real-time visibility into rep activity while automating the manual logging reps hate, and is used by thousands of B2B and B2C sales teams across solar, home improvement, telecom, security and more.
CloudTask
CloudTask is a Miami Beach-based go-to-market marketplace and managed-services provider that helps B2B and SaaS companies hire vetted remote sales, customer success, and support talent - plus agencies and software - in as little as 48 hours. Founded in 2014 by Amir Reiter, the bootstrapped company sources pre-vetted, primarily Latin American SaaS professionals with video profiles and transparent pricing, and has expanded into a broader RevOps ecosystem covering SDR/BDR staffing, lead generation, conversational marketing, and the emerging category of GTM engineers.
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.
Anuj Jalan
Anuj Jalan is the Vice President of Sales Marketing at Microsoft, based in Chandigarh, India. He has built his career across major technology and services firms, moving from process development at Genpact and customer support at Dell to senior sales and marketing leadership at one of the world's largest technology companies. With an MBA from Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies and a background spanning recruitment, operations, and client engagement, Jalan represents the archetype of a career professional who climbed the ranks through diverse industry exposure in India's booming tech sector.
Redrob
Redrob is an AI company building large language models and go-to-market tools for sales, recruitment, and prospecting. Its platform combines a 700M+ contact data pool, verified emails, and real-time buying signals to help B2B teams find prospects, automate outreach, and screen talent. Founded by former international lawyer Felix Kim, Redrob positions itself as an affordable, enterprise-grade AI stack for emerging markets and cost-conscious companies, and aims to become one of the world's most-used LLM platforms by 2028.
SalesHood
SalesHood is a San Francisco-based sales enablement software company founded in 2013 by Elay Cohen and Arthur Do. Born from Cohen's experience scaling Salesforce's sales productivity organization, the platform combines training, coaching, content management, digital sales rooms and AI-driven role play to help B2B revenue teams onboard faster, sell more consistently, and lift win rates. It serves mid-market and enterprise technology companies and has built its reputation on measurable outcomes rather than shelfware.
Nick Smith
Nick Smith is the President, CEO and Founder of Sailes, a New York-based AI company that builds personality-driven autonomous Sailebots to handle B2B prospecting for Fortune 1000 enterprise sales teams. A former sales leader at CBS Corporation and iHeart Radio, he sketched the idea for Sailes on his iPhone at the Lake of the Ozarks on July 4, 2018.
Trey Gibson
Trey Gibson is the co-founder and CEO of SPOTIO, a Dallas-area field sales software company he started in 2014 after a visibility crisis on his own outside sales team, where reps worked territories blind and managers had no idea what was happening in the field. A Texas Tech MBA who spent his early career running foam insulation and construction businesses in the DFW area, Gibson built SPOTIO into a mobile-first platform used by thousands of field reps for GPS activity tracking, territory mapping, and sales engagement. He raised a $4.5M Series A from Ballast Point Ventures in 2020 and now hosts the 'From the Field' podcast, interviewing sales leaders about how modern teams sell, scale, and win.
Across AI
Across AI is a San Francisco startup building an AI 'operator' for high-stakes enterprise workflows, starting with B2B sales. Founded in 2024 by serial entrepreneur Steven Mih with UC Berkeley researcher Niloufar Salehi and Stanford-trained algorithms specialist Afshin Nikzad, the company pairs next-generation agentic memory with patent-pending multi-layered reasoning graphs so that sales teams get a strategist embedded in every deal - one that remembers every interaction, product nuance, and objection, and acts on it with full lineage tracking.
Augment AI
Augment AI is a Seattle-based startup building Decision Site, which it calls a Relationship Operating System for B2B sales teams. The platform pulls meetings, calls, notes, follow-ups, CRM data, Slack threads and buyer resources into a single shared workspace so buyers and sellers can see what has happened, what is happening, and what to do next. Spun out of the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and co-founded by Napster co-founder Jordan Ritter, the company started in 2022 as an AI personal assistant aimed at enabling the four-day workweek and later refocused on agentic tooling for enterprise sales and deal execution.
Grw AI
Grw AI builds Taylor, an AI sales teammate that scales one-to-one coaching and execution across B2B sales teams. It joins calls, transcribes and summarizes meetings, reads and writes to the CRM, runs role-play practice, and coaches reps against a company's own methodology - turning scattered sales know-how into consistent, repeatable performance.
Kular
Kular is a London-based, Y Combinator-backed AI lead generation platform that finds and books qualified customers for businesses over email, LinkedIn, and AI voice - and only charges when it works. Instead of selling software seats or campaign hours, Kular runs the outreach itself and bills per positive reply or booked meeting, aligning its revenue with the results it delivers. The platform serves over 1,000 companies and is built by a team of MIT, Cambridge, and Oxford graduates.
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.
Andrew Fritts
Andrew Fritts is the CEO of Augment AI, a Seattle seed-stage startup building a 'Relationship Operating System' that pulls meetings, calls, notes, CRM data, Slack threads and buyer resources into a shared Decision Site so deals stop living in someone's inbox. A Dartmouth English and Government grad with 25-plus years running sales teams at firms like Accenture and N3, he's the rare sales lifer arguing that the salesperson should stop being the hero. His pitch, repeated across CustomerThink and SalesTechStar columns, is to flip B2B into 'Business with Business' (BwB): elevate the buyer, organize the chaos, and let AI handle the busywork so trust does the selling.
David Chevalier
David Chevalier is the co-founder and CEO of Surfe, a Paris-born sales-tech company that bridges LinkedIn and the CRM. He and Romain Ginestou dreamed up the tool during an exchange at UC Berkeley after getting fed up with copy-pasting prospects into their CRM. Launched as Leadjet, the company bootstrapped to over 1,500 paying customers and 1M EUR ARR with no sales team before rebranding to Surfe and raising a 4M EUR seed round in 2022. Customers include Google, Uber, Spendesk, Mirakl and Opendoor. Chevalier is a vocal advocate for keeping the human in B2B selling, even as he builds tools to automate the busywork around it.
Nelson Jones
Nelson Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Kular, a London-based AI lead generation platform that only charges customers when it delivers actual sales leads. An Oxford law graduate who started building businesses before he finished his degree, Nelson moved from legal-sector sales at Luminance into Entrepreneur First, where he met co-founder Saaras Mehan in the LD16 cohort. The pair launched in 2021, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, and pivoted from an AI business-development tool for law firms into Kular, which today generates leads for over 1,000 companies via email, LinkedIn, and AI voice notes. Kular's signature bet is radical alignment: pay only for results.
Riccardo Pellegrini
Riccardo (Ricky) Pellegrini is the co-founder and CEO of Knode.ai, a New York-based AI sales-management platform that mines sales conversations to coach reps, score calls, and turn winning behaviors into repeatable playbooks. A Harvard College and Harvard Business School graduate, he built his career as a product leader - Head of Product for AWS Data Exchange and VP of Product at RapidSOS - before founding Knode in 2023 with Nicholas Horelik and Henry Katz. He is an inventor on multiple software patents and an active angel investor.
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.
Akoonu
Akoonu is a Salesforce-native revenue intelligence company that helps B2B sales teams inspect their pipeline and build trustworthy forecasts without sending data to an external platform. Its RevWorks suite - covering pipeline reviews, forecasting, deal reviews, quota management, scenario modeling and an AI assistant called Oonu - runs 100% inside Salesforce, installs in under an hour, and positions itself as enterprise-grade forecasting without the enterprise price tag. Founded by serial entrepreneur Jeff Freund and based in Livingston, Montana, the company raised an $8M Series A in 2017 and counts enterprises like Honeywell, Thales and Avery Dennison among its customers.
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.
Jeff Freund
Jeff Freund is the founder and CEO of Akoonu, a Salesforce-native software company that helps B2B sales teams run pipeline reviews and forecasts. A Stanford-trained engineer who studied environmental fluid mechanics, he previously spent more than a decade running Clickability, a web content management company he led from 1999 until its 2011 acquisition by Limelight Networks. He started Akoonu in 2014 around the idea that sales should be grounded in how buyers actually buy, raising an $8M Series A from Shasta Ventures in 2017 and steering the product toward AI-driven forecasting and revenue tools.