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Y Combinator-Backed Startup Returnmetroi agents has raised $2 million in seed funding to create AI research agents that augment rather than replace human sales teams, bucking the industry trend of AI avatars automating sales functions.
The San Francisco-based company, founded just four months ago, has already reached $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue during its eight-week beta period, making it the fastest-growing startup in Y Combinator’s current batch, according to its founders.
“Only humans can close big deals, but AI can make them much smarter and faster,” Kenson Chung told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. The 22-year-old abandoned University College Londonfrom the computer science program to co-found Origami Agents. The company’s AI agents perform the tedious research work that typically consumes up to three hours of a sales rep’s day.
The startup’s initial traction offers a stark contrast to heavily funded competitors like 11x and Craftsmanwho have raised tens of millions to develop AI avatars that attempt to fully automate sales outreach. Origami’s founders argue that this approach often results in spam that damages customer relationships.
AI Sales Research: How Origami Agents is Transforming B2B Lead Generation
One of the first clients to see spectacular results is Stellara property maintenance marketplace that has grown its customer base eight-fold in nine months, partly attributed to Origami’s technology. “The quality of leads we get is extraordinarily high,” said Matt Wetrich, CEO of Stellar and former Uber executive. “My outbound email closes are four times higher than the industry average.”
Wetrich, who became an angel investor in Origami after experiencing the impact of its product, explained that the technology helps identify property management companies ideally sized for Stellar’s services while filtering out the bad ones. options, work that previously required significant manual effort on the part of your team.
“Instead of it being like ground meat, and you have to shape it, now it’s like coming out like a steak,” Wetrich said, describing the quality of Origami wires compared to traditional methods.
The founding team brings relevant experience to the challenge. Before founding Origami, Finn Mallery created custom outbound solutions for over 20 startups after working on go-to-market strategy at Effervescencewhile Chung served as chief technology officer at an enterprise sales platform.
Industry experts suggest the time could be right for Origami’s approach. While AI has begun to transform various aspects of business operations, its application in B2B sales remains nascent. “You just won’t know the world three years from now with this,” Wetrich predicted. “The gravy train just left.”
The seed funding will help Origami expand beyond its initial customer base in property management and real estate into other B2B verticals. Company agents can now analyze everything from product reviews to social media engagement to identify potential customers at the moment of greatest purchase intent.
“There is enough information on the Internet to know exactly who your perfect customers are,” Mallery said. “We are realizing the power of all the unstructured data on the Internet by creating a widespread solution that any company can use.”
The future of sales: AI that works with humans, not against them
As debates continue over AI’s role in sales, Origami’s rapid growth suggests that there may be more value in augmenting human capabilities than attempting to replace them entirely. The company’s approach could offer a model for how AI can enhance, rather than eliminate, human roles in other business functions.
“It won’t look much like a computer; It will be very similar to electricity,” Wetrich said, comparing AI’s impact on sales to other transformative technologies. “Everyone lives, breathes and dies on income. And if you can find ways to make more income…that’s what they allow you to do.”
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