While stealth has its competitive advantages for startups, investors must find ways to identify early the business models under development.
Entrepreneurs are seizing opportunities to automate business processes using AI. Stealth mode startups, Sofie Labs and Bland AI, are just two of many launching AI platforms offering efficiencies unachievable before AI. The former targets the sale process and the latter enterprise phone calls.
Sofie Labs’ co-founder Vitaly Golomb, a guest on the podcast Experienced Voices™ discussed the companies AI platform that improves the sales process by automating the role of Sales Development Representatives (SDR).
Sofie identified two costly inefficiencies of SDRs. They often forward a poor inbound lead to an account manager wasting their time or they fail to follow up on a solid qualified lead. In addition, the position has high hiring costs due to the training required and its above average turnover.
“It’s very expensive to recruit, train, and retain this particular group. We can effectively automate that position and nobody knows,” Golomb explains. “In under two minutes a very personalized custom response is sent to that prospect in 35 languages, 24 hours a day with qualifying questions.”
The result is a dramatic improvement in qualified leads and cost savings without the SDR position.
“We’re able to set up three times more qualified calls for the sales reps without increasing the marketing budget. That’s a tremendous effect when talking about half of a company’s budget is marketing and sales. That’s a tremendous advantage for companies using automation over their competitors”.
When discussing Sofie Labs’ stealth mode, Golomb explains that he and his co-founder first started Sofie Labs to run experiments and find commercial applications of a particular technology called Autonomous Agents. They tried a few ideas before settling on what they built. They felt it was important to validate what they created and learn how to best position it in the market.
“The bigger mistake I think is a lot of entrepreneurs stay in stealth for too long,” says Golomb. “They think that they know exactly what they need to build. especially when you have entrepreneurs who are just purely engineers who have never gone to market or sold something”.
The other stealth startup Brand AI was founded in 2023 by Isaiah Granet and Sobhan Nejad. It recently emerged from stealth and is focusing on outdated human-operated communication systems. The startup’s AI platform automates phone calls and visualizes call data.
Their platform uses hyper-realistic AI agents which streamline clients’ phone-based tasks ranging from customer support to sales to internal operations. The company tackles the phone call with the goal of making the days when of employees dial numbers, answer calls, and talk to leads, customers, and other businesses in the past.
“Bland AI is reimagining how enterprises communicate,” said Andy Vitus, Partner at Scale Venture Partners. “The Bland AI agents understand human emotion, speak any language, and represent a brand like a top employee. The platform saves businesses time and money, and enables a whole new era of intelligent, personalized interactions at scale – and we’re excited to partner with the team as they build.”
The Bland AI Phone Calling Platform allows enterprises to securely/safely build, test, and deploy their own AI phone calling agents. They begin by choosing a voice and creating a conversational pathway. A tree of prompts using AI gives a response to customers.
Key features include:
- Integrations into any other system, knowledge retrieval from documents, and the ability to transfer to a human when necessary,
- Transcripts of calls, post call analytics, and the ability to train the AI on your own phone calling data, and
- Voice cloning, multi-language support, an AI testing system, and infinite calling scalability.
Isaiah Granet, CEO and Co-Founder of Bland AI, describes the inefficiencies companies face that AI can now solve.
“The problem is that humans simply can’t work 24/7, handle millions of phone calls simultaneously, or be trained to a company’s exact liking down to its voice and behavior – but AI can, and at a fraction of the cost”.
Bland gained the support of top investors with Scale Venture Partners leading the recent $16 million round, bringing their total funding to $22 million.
Other participants are Y Combinator and angel investors Max Levchin the founder of Paypal, Piotr Dąbkowski the CTO of Eleven Labs CTO, Jeff Lawson the founder of Twilio, and others. These top echelon investors can offer a startup such as Bland AI the critical resources needed to develop their product without public disclosure.
Sofie Labs and Bland AI silently race to develop products that would bring significant cost savings to clients’ business processes. Investors are also in a race to identify other startups like them which became apparent in a recent article published by the venture capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz. The article is titled, “Death of a Salesforce”: Why AI Will Transform the Next Generation of Sales Tech” by co-authors, Zeya Yang, Marc Andrusko, and Angela Strange.
An excerpt describes the transformation underway in the sales process due to AI which creates investment opportunities.
“Instead of a text-based database, the core of the next sales platform will be multi-modal (text, image, voice, video), containing every customer insight from across the company. An AI-native platform can extract more insight from a customer and their mindset than we could ever piece together with the tools we have today”.
They continue, “Sales workflows will fundamentally change. With AI, sales teams will no longer need to spend endless hours researching new leads or prepping for calls — AI will be able to do it in seconds”.
The firm sees AI directly impacting how sellers and buyers engage—and they foresee a new model evolving. With high expectations of what is to come, Andreesen Horowitz encourages entrants into this space to contact them.
With Sofie Labs and Bland AI becoming public, how many more AI startups are working in stealth mode and sought by first or early investors?
