The Deal Room Has a Ghost

Picture a sales engineer at 11pm before a big demo. She's got five active deals, three product gaps she's promised to track down, a Salesforce log she hasn't touched in a week, and a Slack thread asking if that one feature the prospect needs is "on the roadmap." Nobody knows. The SE is the only person who does, or should.

This is how the majority of enterprise B2B deals run. The technical layer - the layer that actually determines whether a prospect buys - is invisible, unmeasured, and ultimately dependent on a single person's memory and mood. It's a structural problem dressed up as a people problem.

Vivun decided to treat it as an engineering problem.

Presales Was the Last Black Box in Revenue

By 2019, sales had Salesforce. Marketing had HubSpot. Customer success had Gainsight. Every function in the revenue engine had its operating system - except presales. Sales engineers ran on memory, email threads, and sheer personal heroism. When they won deals, credit went to "the sales team." When they lost them, the reasons disappeared into the ether.

The broader dysfunction was measurable: enterprise deals were getting longer and more technically complex, yet the tools SEs used hadn't materially changed. Meanwhile, SEs were being asked to do more - run more demos, map more customer requirements, build more business cases, own more of the technical relationship - with no infrastructure to support any of it.

The average enterprise SE carried somewhere between 10 and 30 active opportunities. They knew which ones were at risk. Rarely did anyone else.

Two Couples. One Conviction.

The founding team's origin story is unusual even by startup standards. Matt Darrow (CEO) and Dominique Darrow (CCO) are married. So are John Bruce (CTO) and Claire Bruce (COO). All four left steady careers to co-found Vivun in 2019 - a decision that implies either exceptional conviction or exceptional trust in each other. Probably both.

Matt and John had spent the previous decade in presales at Big Machines (acquired by Oracle) and Zuora (IPO'd in 2018). They had lived the problem from the inside. Dominique had built and run global customer success teams at Google. Claire was a trained IP attorney who had served as general counsel for a large multinational. The combined profile: two people who understood the technical sales problem deeply, and two people who understood how to build and operate a durable company around it.

Their central bet was this: presales is not a support function. It's a revenue function. And revenue functions deserve software built specifically for them.

Not Just AI. Structured Expert Reasoning.

Most AI products for sales run on the same fundamental approach: take a large language model, add some company context, and generate plausible-sounding output. Vivun went a different direction. The Vivun Intelligence System - built from tens of millions of SE activities across hundreds of thousands of real enterprise opportunities - encodes how elite practitioners actually think, not just what they say.

The distinction matters. An LLM can write a business case. It can't tell you which of your 14 open deals is most at risk of slipping because the SE is carrying too many opportunities and the prospect's legal team went quiet two weeks ago. Vivun's agents reason through structured expert knowledge. Every conclusion traces back to an explicit structure. The AI doesn't just generate; it thinks.

Six Years. Four Funding Rounds. One Very Clear Direction.

Numbers from Real Customers. No Asterisks.

Vivun publishes its outcome data through UserEvidence - a third-party platform that verifies customer survey responses. The numbers below aren't from a press release; they're from customers who agreed to be counted.

Who Bet $131M on Presales AI

Why Presales. Why Now. Why AI.

Enterprise sales cycles are getting longer. The number of stakeholders involved in a single B2B deal has grown - buyers now involve more technical evaluators, more security reviewers, more finance sign-offs. Sales engineers are in every one of those conversations. They're the people who can answer the hard questions, navigate the objections, and build the business case that moves a deal from "interesting" to "approved."

And yet most SE teams scale by headcount alone. Need to cover more pipeline? Hire more SEs. There's no multiplier - until now. Vivun's AI agents give individual SEs the capacity to run more deals with more intelligence, while giving managers the visibility to see what's actually happening in the technical layer of every opportunity.

The larger premise is that AI only becomes genuinely useful in enterprise sales when it's grounded in structured, domain-specific expertise. Generic LLMs can pass the surface test. They can write a follow-up email or generate a discovery question. What they can't do is reason through why a specific deal is at risk given 12 technical objections, 3 product gaps, and a prospects' security team going quiet. That requires expertise, encoded into the AI's structure. That's what Vivun built.

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