Vlad Voskresensky and the case of the disappearing CRM

Vlad Voskresensky’s salespeople had a complaint about the software their company had bought. They could sell, or they could fill in the CRM. The implication was that somebody ought to choose. For a business paying for software intended to improve sales, this was an awkward little referendum. Voskresensky and his colleagues took the complaint seriously enough to build a company around it.

The result was InvisibleCRM, an unusually candid name for an enterprise software business. Its ambition was to reduce how much people noticed the machinery. A salesperson could carry on in an inbox while information found its way into the corporate system. Management would get its records. The salesperson would get some time back. The form, for once, could fill itself.

That argument has accompanied Voskresensky through the business now called Revenue Grid, from its early integration work to guided selling and AI assistants. Today he is Revenue Grid’s co-founder and Head of Product, with Eric Holmen as CEO. His newer venture, ChatRevenue.ai, puts a conversational interface at the center of sales automation. Across the changing names and roles, the original irritation remains remarkably recognizable.

The customer was already in the building

Before the product came the services business. Voskresensky co-founded Afortio, a Ukrainian software development company. In the mid-2000s, larger outsourcing businesses were competing for engineers, making expansion through hiring more difficult. A product offered a different possibility: build something the business could sell repeatedly, rather than make growth depend so heavily on adding people.

There was a less financial motive, too. Voskresensky described the peculiar feedback loop of services work: silence when things went well, complaints when they did not. He wanted to hear what customers valued. Anyone who has delivered a project and received only another spreadsheet may recognize the attraction.

Afortio collaborated with VDI, whose CEO, Anatoly Gaverdovsky, helped drive the InvisibleCRM idea. The companies themselves were paying for Salesforce licenses while struggling to get people to use the system. This gave the founders a test case close enough to inspect without commissioning a market report. The inconvenience they wanted to remove was already sitting at their own desks.

Voskresensky later named Gaverdovsky, Konstantin Vaganov and Anton Zubenko as his fellow founders. Revenue Grid dates its beginnings to 2005. Its history includes partnerships with enterprise vendors whose systems already occupied substantial parts of customers’ working lives. The practical question was how to connect those systems to the places where conversations actually happened.

“Sales people ‘live’ in MS Outlook.”

Vlad Voskresensky, 2011

A product needs people who stay with it

Moving from client projects to a product required a change in staffing habits. The team learned that assigning developers whenever they happened to be free was a poor foundation for something customers would depend on continuously. Eventually, selected engineers concentrated on the product full time. Finishing a client assignment and maintaining a product had different rhythms, and the company had to organize around that difference.

This experience gives Voskresensky’s founder story a useful rough edge. The product did not simply emerge because capable programmers had an idea. The business had to make room for work that would not end at a client’s acceptance meeting. Bugs, support and the next release would still be waiting after the congratulations.

By 2021, he described Revenue Grid’s beginnings as the work of engineers and product developers who wanted enterprise software to fit into existing workflows. The customer he kept returning to was the salesperson expected to use it. A purchase approved by management still had to earn a place in somebody else’s afternoon.

Two toothbrushes, one working week

Selling internationally also meant learning to live internationally. The early prototypes went to a CRM exhibition in San Francisco. Over time, Voskresensky’s work stretched between the Ukrainian development team and the American market. In a 2017 account of his life, he described dividing his time between Kyiv and the Bay Area, keeping a toothbrush in each.

The domestic arrangements had their own business logic. The company rented a house in California because repeated hotel stays for visiting colleagues cost enough to make a shared base sensible. It served as accommodation, a place to work and somewhere to leave belongings. International expansion, viewed from the laundry basket, can look rather ordinary.

His account of settling in included a small encounter at a party. Asked where he came from, he began explaining Kyiv. The other guest asked where he lived now. San Mateo, he answered. That was sufficient for the guest, who treated him as being from San Mateo. Voskresensky remembered the exchange as an example of how quickly belonging could be offered.

He also described taking a laptop and folding chair to the ocean to work, finding it especially productive with the internet switched off. Football was another way to stop thinking about work. These were details of his life then, alongside a stated attachment to Ukraine and a wish to return. They give the transatlantic business story a human scale: calls, traffic, a chair, a ball.

The inbox begins to give advice

By 2018, the product called SmartCloud Connect brought Salesforce information into email and calendar tools. Contacts, meetings, attachments and tasks could move between systems. Its contextual sidebar let people work with CRM information inside the inbox. Voskresensky’s explanation emphasized connecting business processes as well as transferring data, because customers had their own ways of working.

He was already asking a further question. A CRM held accumulated business knowledge; an email system held the conversations. Once connected, could they help someone decide what to do? The engineering work of synchronization was becoming the foundation for recommendations. Information that had been difficult to enter might become information useful enough to consult.

The company rebranded as Revenue Grid in 2020. Guided selling gave the expanded approach a name: capture activity, interpret what is happening, and help a salesperson choose the next step. In a 2021 conversation with Scott Ingram, Voskresensky distinguished understanding the situation from knowing how to act on it. That distinction explains much of his product agenda without requiring a tour of a dashboard.

His own writing about revenue leakage in 2023 put the problem in everyday terms: a contact changes jobs, a message is duplicated, a sales forecast rests on an error. Each incident can look small from a desk. Together they give a company reasons to examine the handoffs and missing context inside its sales process.

In a December 2023 interview, he discussed alerts that could assign a follow-up to the right recipient, phone integrations that reduced switching between tools, and scheduling across calendars. These are humble jobs for software. They are also jobs people perform repeatedly, which makes a little friction surprisingly expensive over time.

The long wait before the $20 million

The financing history moved at a different pace from the product releases. In September 2021, Revenue Grid announced a $20 million Series A led by W3 Capital, with ICU Ventures and existing investors participating. Bob Stutz, whose career included senior roles at Salesforce, Microsoft and SAP, joined the board. The round brought both money and people familiar with the enterprise market.

Voskresensky said the company had been profitable before raising that round. An earlier $1.5 million angel investment had effectively become $750,000 after half was returned when an investor exited. He described the intervening years as growth largely financed by the business itself. The new capital was intended to expand the team and increase market awareness.

At the time, the company reported more than 170 employees, with plans to reach 250. These figures belong to that moment, when the main development office and most staff were in Kyiv. They help explain what the financing was meant to buy: more capacity to bring an established product to customers.

His ambition extended to the people building it. In 2021, he spoke about wanting colleagues to become millionaires through a successful exit. He also voiced an interest in eventually entering politics in Ukraine, supported by sufficient financial independence. Those were aspirations, expressed in public, rather than outcomes to put on a trophy shelf.

Another company, the same unfinished chore

Revenue Grid introduced Meeting and Pipeline AI Assistants at Dreamforce in September 2024. Their announced purpose included handling repetitive tasks, preparing useful guidance and making the pipeline easier to inspect. Voskresensky again described the CRM as something that should work quietly behind the scenes. Two decades of software development had given the original complaint new tools to work with.

His advice to sales teams preparing for 2025 was deliberately incremental. Break work into routines that can be explained, let AI handle a manageable task, and teach it more over time. He compared the process to training a junior employee. It was a patient prescription from someone whose business depended on customers finding automation useful.

In June 2025, Revenue Grid launched Mentor, a conversational capability for questions about pipeline changes, deal risk and coaching. Meanwhile, Voskresensky co-founded ChatRevenue.ai. By September 2025, he and Veeam founder Ratmir Timashev were building an AI-native sales platform with a chat-driven interface. His work now also includes ChatRevenue.

The newer venture makes an interesting companion to his long product career. First came the connection between an inbox and a corporate database. Then came interpreting the activity. Now a conversation itself can become the way to ask the software for help. Voskresensky is still working on what happens between a seller and the system that records the sale. The paperwork has acquired a vocabulary. He would like it to do more of the work.