How AI sales startup Landbase nabbed Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures to lead its $30M Series A

Summary

When Daniel Saks was working as a co-CEO of the previous startup he co-founded, AppDirect, billionaire Michael Dell sent him a LinkedIn message asking for a meeting. Dell famously likes to cold-contact founders of startups he finds interesting. “I thought it was fake,” Saks tells TechCrunch. But he replied anyway. “So I’m getting ready for this call, thinking there’s no way it’s Michael Dell. And I’m almost kind of laughing about it. It actually was Michael.” That interaction taught him a lesson that would prove vital for his current startup, Landbase: When people know who you are, they answer your cold outreach. Saks left AppDirect — which helps enterprise software companies handle recurring billing — about a year ago to found Landbase. Landbase does what Saks likes to call “vibe GTM,” using AI to automate outreach marketing. On Thursday, it announced a $30 million Series A co-led by Sound Ventures and existing investor Picus Capital, with participation from other existing backers including 8VC, A*, and Firstminute Capital. The product is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o base model fine-tuned with data from 40 million marketing campaigns (using reinforcement learning with human intervention), Saks says. The data was obtained through partnerships with marketing agencies. The idea was to go beyond training a model on company- and person-specific info to train on successful outcomes. But the research from those 40 million campaigns showed something interesting: Over half of the campaigns had failed, often having little to do with copy wording. They failed because of a lack of “trust” in the sender. The reverse lesson from that Dell meeting? If people don’t know who you are, they don’t respond to your messages. “As a first-time startup founder with a brand-new company, you have virtually no chance of being able to do an outbound campaign with success,” Saks told TechCrunch. The solution, he naturally believes, is to get the startup’s name out there more, in “very targeted wa...