Salesforge's AI-copilots get $500K funding to replace sales underperformers

If you're working in sales and are underperforming — watch out. An AI-copilot could soon replace you by helping a far leaner team to seal the deals. 

Frank Sondors is the CEO and co-founder of Salesforge, a company that has developed AI-embedded sales team software. 

With a career of over a decade in sales, most recently as SVP of Sales at Whatagraph managing a sales team of about 50 people, he sees the prevailing model of large, expensive sales teams that rely on volume-based tactics like mass emailing and cold calling, is outdated:

"I observed that my own team was already bloated when it came to headcount and that this is really a software problem. 

"I typically say that for every ten individuals you hire, one is a natural. Two to three people can be trained to be as good as the person who is a natural in sales. Then about 60 per cent typically have to be let go as soon as possible."

And it's a problem felt throughout sales teams as companies seek to grow customers while maintaining efficiency. 

"B2B sales leaders increasingly find themselves between a rock and a hard place - on the one hand, the buyer personas are tired of generic messaging, pushing sales leaders for larger and more personalised campaigns." 

On the other hand, email providers are introducing stricter deliverability standards, making old-school spray-and-pray campaigns obsolete.

Sondors explained: 

"Our approach combines a keen focus on multi-source AI personalisation with an eye for deliverability, which a flexible, usage-based pricing model underscores, solving the problem of bloated teams."

Salesforge has released two products: Salesforge and Mailforge. Salesforge crafts unique emails in any language with a strong focus on deliverability, while Mailforge provides the necessary infrastructure and easy domain and mailbox management. 

Good sales is about sending great emails that are less likely to result in spam rather than sending a bunch of templates. 

Sondors shared:

"90 per cent of all the sales emails I get sent are templated. That template is being sent across maybe hundreds of thousands of individuals out there, so it doesn't speak to me as an individual, much less to my business needs." 

Instead, think emails that get the point of a company's pain point infused with publicly available data sources and/or CRM. In these situations, Generative AI can provide insights based on publicly available data into a company and its needs, and write email copy at 10x human speed.

From user to seller 

Salesforce was its own first customer in that the company used its product thesis as a testing ground for potential customer and investor outreach. 

Sondors met his two co-founders on the Y Combinator matchmaking platform in January 2023. The team had an MVP out by March and then launched a beta model. In a matter of months, the company had over 100 clients, a number which has grown to over 800 clients across the US and EMEA and over €1 million in ARR in less than ten months with only a four-person team

As Sondors notes:

"We still love our own software and use it to scale our business which also helps us to be very lean and mean." 

Salesforge has gained traction across a vast number of verticals. 

Sondors details:

"Our largest client sells trucks and truck parts in the US. For them, ads are too expensive, and they have a clear ideal customer they want to reach." 

The company also works with plenty of SaaS companies that need to scale fast and efficiently with the least possible headcount,  consultants, and even has a handful of direct competitors using its software. 

Salesforge has captured the interest of investors. Today, the company announced a $500K raise from BADideas.fund, Spring Capital, Fiedler Capital, and super angel Maciej Zawadzinski, supercharging the team's ambition to redefine the landscape of B2B sales.

According to Raimonds Kulbergs, CEO of BADideas.fund:

"Salesforge capitalises on an opportunity in a market that currently sees tectonic shifts leveling the playing field for new entrants.

AI-driven personalisation and tightening email controls, taken together with rising labour costs, have created a world where single-person sales teams are not just possible, but they can thrive.

Dogfooding their own product for months, Salesforge is the prime example of that."

Salesforge is using publicly available large language models right now, but plans to host its own models and train against our own datasets in the future so that non-PI (publicly identifiable) data is used to help customers build really great emails based on their industry and the ideal customer that they're targeting rather than simply leveraging publicly available models. 

The current funding round will fuel Salesforge's growth to unlock new channels and enable autonomous capabilities and CRM integrations to cover the entire pipeline generation process. 

And as for the people displaced from sales jobs by software such as Salesforge? 

Sondors believes that "the really good salespeople will never be replaced because really good sales people will always outperform."

"What the software does do is replace the bottom performing headcounts, that's at least 50 percent. 

Because these individuals are not really at great at their jobs, we'd say they should not be in sales, they should be doing something else that they're good at."

Lead image: Left to right: Dovydas Volodko, Frank Sondors and Daniel Sanchez.