outbound-sales
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Growth Era and the art of the next step
A booked meeting is a beginning. Growth Era built its business around the people, processes, and persistent follow-up that turn that beginning into a sale.
Abstrakt Marketing Group sells the meeting before the sale
A commercial painter needed more doors to open. Abstrakt started with the size of the building - and built a business around doing the prospecting other companies keep putting off.
Nima Hakimi and the Art of Starting Over
A favor for a cousin became Convoso. For Nima Hakimi, keeping it alive meant rebuilding the software, learning to lead, and deciding which calls were worth making.
Zayd Syed Ali and the useful art of changing your mind
Two agency exits taught Zayd Syed Ali how to get people into a meeting. Building Valley has taught him when to leave an idea behind, when to keep asking, and when to let someone else take the wheel.
The Three Scientists Who Tried to Sell Their Way Out of Selling
Amplemarket began with founders who hated the busywork of finding customers. Their answer is a single sales system that spots a reason to call, finds the right person, and helps a human decide what to say.
The Sales Rep Who Never Picks Up the Phone
Artisan made its name telling companies to stop hiring humans. Its more interesting lesson came after the slogan: autonomous sales works best when the machine knows exactly when to hand the conversation back.
Reply.io Wants the Whole Outbound Desk
Reply.io now finds prospects, warms inboxes, writes the pitch, works the follow-up, and can even book the meeting. The clever bit is not the robot rep. It is putting the entire outbound mess on one desk.
Lemlist Wants Your Cold Email to Feel Less Cold
The French sales platform has spent eight years turning a personalization trick into an outbound control room. Here is who should use it, what the credits really buy, and where the charm meets the spreadsheet.
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.
Persana Built the Sales Machine - Then Pulled the Plug
Persana AI squeezed prospect research, enrichment, intent signals and outreach into one busy workspace. It won loyal sales teams, raised $2.3 million, and then shut the standalone product after joining Rox.
UserGems Failed at Resale, Recruiting and Influencers - Then Turned Job Changes Into Pipeline
Twin brothers Christian and Stephan Kletzl spent years building products nobody quite wanted. Their fourth idea found a warm lead hiding in plain sight - and became a pricey AI command center for revenue teams allergic to cold outreach.
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.
Your CRM Choice Comes Down to the Phone
Pipedrive is the flexible pipeline manager. Close is the sales floor with a phone built in - and for teams that live on calls, that difference settles the argument.
The Company That Rents You a Sales Team in the Gulf - and the AI That Tells It Who to Call
Selling software into the Gulf usually means hiring locally, learning the market the hard way, and waiting months to get paid. Cadena turns that whole problem into a subscription.
Your CRM Already Picked Your Sales Engagement Shortlist
Groove is a Salesforce-native choice, so non-Salesforce teams can cross it off immediately. The real contest then comes down to Outreach’s control, Salesloft’s workflow, or Apollo’s data-plus-engagement bundle.
Squaretalk
The cloud contact center platform trying to turn every outbound call into a smarter, faster, better-connected conversation - without the enterprise price tag.
Voiso
Every interaction, a human connection.
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.
Apten
Apten is a Y Combinator (S24) startup building omni-channel AI agents that engage and nurture leads across SMS, voice, email, and webchat. Aimed at B2C enterprises in home services, insurance, education, healthcare, and financial services, its agents hold one continuous memory across every channel, follow up at the right moment, transfer live calls to humans, and plug into CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. The company says its conversational approach converts previously dead leads into sales opportunities at a much higher rate than robocalls or static drip campaigns.
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.
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.
Orum
Orum is an AI-powered live conversation platform for B2B sales teams. Its dialer automates the tedious parts of outbound calling - filtering out voicemails, bad numbers, and phone trees - so reps spend more time in live conversations. Layered on top is an AI coaching and enablement suite (scorecards, roleplay, live call visibility) that helps managers develop reps and shorten ramp time. Founded in 2018 by Jason Dorfman, the fully remote company has powered more than a billion calls and is used by over 1,200 revenue teams.
Jason Dorfman
Jason Dorfman is the co-founder and CEO of Orum, a live conversation platform that uses a parallel dialer and speech recognition to help sales reps skip busy signals, voicemails, and dead numbers so they reach live prospects faster. He built the idea out of a problem he lived through as the first sales hire at Rubrik, where reps dialed 100 times a day to get a handful of pickups. Since founding Orum in 2019 with Karthik Viswanathan, he has raised more than $50 million and grown the company into a widely used tool across outbound sales teams. He is based in Austin, Texas.
Regie.ai
Regie.ai is a San Francisco-based startup building an AI-native sales engagement platform that automates the grind of B2B outbound prospecting - sourcing leads, reading intent signals, writing personalized messages, and running email, phone, and social touches - while deciding on the fly whether an AI agent or a human rep should take the next step. Founded in 2021 by AI scientist Srinath Sridhar and sales veteran Matt Millen, the company pitches itself as a middle path between fully manual sales tools and fully autonomous bots, with a stated goal of amplifying human sellers rather than replacing them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.