Y Combinator’s hottest startup, Origami Agents, secures $2M seed round to power sales teams with AI

Startup backed by Y Combinator Origami agents raised $2 million in seed funding to build AI research agents that augment rather than replace human sales teams, breaking away from the industry trend of AI avatars automating sales roles.

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 the current batch of Y Combinator, according to the founders.

“Only humans can make big deals, but AI can make them much smarter and faster,” Kenson Chung told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. The 22-year-old dropped out of University College Londoncomputer science program to co-found Origami Agents. The company’s AI agents do the tedious research work that typically takes up to three hours of a sales rep’s day.

The startup’s early traction offers a stark contrast to heavily funded rivals like 11x and Artisanalwhich raised tens of millions to develop AI avatars that attempt to fully automate sales. Origami’s founders argue that this approach often results in spam that damages customer relationships.

AI Sales Research: How Origami Agents Transform B2B Lead Generation

One early customer who is seeing dramatic results is Stellara property maintenance marketplace that grew its customer base eightfold in nine months, thanks in part to Origami’s technology. “The quality of leads we’re getting is extremely high,” said Matt Wettrich, Stellar’s CEO and former Uber executive. “My outbound emails get closed at four times the industry average.”

Wetrich, who became an angel investor in Origami after experiencing the product’s impact, explained that the technology helps identify property management companies that are the perfect size for Stellar’s services, while filtering out bad matches—a job that previously required significant manual efforts by his team.

“Instead of it being like ground beef and you have to shape it into something, now it’s like arriving like a steak,” Wetrich said, describing the quality of primes that Origami delivers compared to traditional methods.

The founding team brings relevant experience to the challenge. Prior to starting Origami, Finn Mallery built custom outbound solutions for over 20 startups after working on go-to-market strategy at Physwhile Chung served as a CTO in an enterprise sales platform.

Industry experts suggest the timing may be right for Origami’s approach. Although AI has begun to transform various aspects of business operations, its application in B2B sales remains in its infancy. “You just won’t recognize the world in three years with this,” Wetrich predicted. “The gravy train is about to leave.”

The seed funding will help Origami expand beyond its initial customer base in property management and real estate into other B2B verticals. The company’s agents can now analyze everything from product reviews to social media engagement to identify potential customers at the moment of their greatest purchase intent.

“There’s enough information on the Internet to know exactly who your perfect customers are,” Malleri said. “We’re realizing the power of unstructured data across the Internet by building an aggregated solution that any company can use.”

The future of sales: AI that works with people, not against them

While debates over AI’s role in sales continue, Origami’s rapid growth suggests there may be more value in augmenting human capabilities than trying to replace them entirely. The company’s approach could offer a blueprint for how AI can enhance, rather than eliminate, human roles in other business functions.

“It won’t look much like a computer. It’s going to be a lot like electricity,” Wetrich said, comparing AI’s impact on sales to other transformative technologies. “Everyone lives, breathes and dies by revenue. And if you can find ways to get more revenue … that’s what they’re enabling you to do.”