AI sales rep startups are a very crowded market these days. If you’re driving into San Francisco from the airport, you’ll probably spot billboards promising that you can “Stop Hiring Humans” (Artisan) or urging you to “Hire Piper, the AI SDR” (Qualified). While some of these startups are certainly growing fast, the field has its challenges and some VCs are wary.
Anshul Gupta, co-founder of Actively AI, admits the early versions of these AI sales tools don’t live up to their own hype. Gupta claims classic AI sales reps aren’t the right approach, telling TechCrunch they’ve “failed” by focusing too much “pure volume” – that means contacting as many potential customers as possible.
Founded in 2022, Actively AI argues it has a different approach. The startup builds custom ‘reasoning’ models for companies to sift through their data and find the highest-value prospects to sell to, mirroring the work that top human sales reps do.
It’s a new way of leveraging reasoning tech, a technique that’s taken the AI world by storm by forcing AI models to flesh out their logic and double-check their work.
Actively claims this method is working, touting that it has helped clients like fintech Ramp get tens of millions of dollars in extra revenue.
The New York-based startup has now raised $17.5 million in Series A funding from Bain Capital Ventures, it exclusively told TechCrunch. That follows a previously unannounced $5 million seed round from First Round Capital, bringing total funding to $22.5 million.
“We call it ‘GTM Superintelligence’—a reasoning-driven approach that doesn’t just automate or assist, but actively makes the best possible decisions to drive growth,” Actively’s CEO (and other co-founder) Mihir Garimella said in a statement.
The startup says it uses a combination of in-house models and popular reasoning models from OpenAI and Anthropic to power its tech. Both founders previously studied AI at Stanford, with Garimella focusing on a field closely related to reasoning called active learning, giving Actively its name.
Actively’s fundraise is the latest evidence that the boom in reasoning models could be spreading beyond foundational AI companies like OpenAI or DeepSeek to startups.
Just last week, for example, a YC-backed startup raised $5 million claiming it had built a ‘reasoning engine’ for slashing paperwork in healthcare. That startup, Taxo, said it had passed $1 million ARR in six months. (Actively declined to share its exact ARR, but said it has grown tenfold in 9 months.)
It’s still a bit early to tell whether Actively’s reasoning-powered approach will work as advertised, or if this will become just a new spin on AI sales tools. After all, reasoning only really took off late last year with the rise of DeepSeek. For now, though, some investors are certainly buying the pitch.
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