While Daniel Sachs was working as co-CEO of a former startup, he co-founded AppDirect, billionaire Michael Dell sent a LinkedIn message asking for a meeting. Dell is famous for his favourite founder of startup calm contacts that he finds interesting.
“I thought it was a fake,” Sachs told TechCrunch. But he answered anyway. “So I’m getting ready for this phone. I don’t think it’s Michael Dell. And I’m pretty much laughing about it. It was actually Michael.”
That interaction taught him an essential lesson for his current startup, Landbase. When people know who you are, they respond to your cold outreach.
Saks left AppDirect – which helps enterprise software companies handle regular billing – found Landbase about a year ago.
Landbase does what Saks likes to call “Vibe GTM” and uses AI to automate outreach marketing. On Thursday, it announced a $30 million Series A co-led by Sound Ventures and existing investor Picus Capital, and announced participation from other existing supporters, including 8VC, A* and Firstminute Capital.
The product is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4O-based model with fine-tuning data from 40 million marketing campaigns (using reinforcement learning with human intervention), says Saks. Data was obtained through partnerships with marketing institutions.
The idea went beyond training models on corporate and person-specific information to train successful outcomes. However, the survey from these 40 million campaigns has been interesting. More than half of the campaign failed, with little to do with copying language. They failed because the sender lacks “trust”.
That Dell Conference Reverse Lesson? If people don’t know who you are, they won’t respond to your message.
“As the founder of the first startup of a new company, there is little chance that you will be able to successfully run an outbound campaign,” Saks told TechCrunch.
He believes that, he naturally believes the solution is to “a highly targeted method” rather than “spray and prayer” and to make the startup name even more “a highly targeted method”.
Before AI, it required a bigger marketing budget to do that. Automation tools allow businesses to run campaigns “in minutes rather than months” with fewer people at a reasonable price.
Saks has built their own “digital trust” by giving their own advice, including creating YouTube content and creating his personal website. He then used Landbase products to “we went out with 10 paid customers at the end of December 2024, and now we have over 100 paid customers,” he said.
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Landbase’s Series A funding really proved Saks’ paper. And he landed him one of the most connected AI investors in sound ventures. For example, we support Openai, Humanity, Embracing Face, Stability AI, and the World Lab of Fei-fei Li.
In September, Landbase raised $12.5 million in seeds from A*, 8VC, Firstminute Capital and others. Saks has known his seed VC since his days at AppDirect. They were also impressed by the founding team, including CPO Emily Zhang (formerly CARTA) and Chief Data Scientist Hua Gao (Zoominfo).
Seed News suddenly put the saxophone on Silicon Valley VC Radar. “We were focused on digital trust, so we started getting a lot of inbound from investors,” he said.
Within a few weeks of Series A News, around 130 VCs contacted and products including Sound Ventures were launched. When the Sachs were ready to raise the A, he booked a meeting of 50 with top pick VCs on a whirlwind trip to San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.
Sound won the deal when he proposed to improve his startup’s marketing catchphrase from “intelligently automate” to “find the next customer.”
Still, despite raising $42.5 million, Landbase has entered a crowded market filled with wealthy competitors such as Regie.ai, Aisdr, Artisan, 11x.ai and the aforementioned Zoominfo.
Randbase distinguishes itself by not pretending to be a human alternative, says Sachs. It does not give the technology a human name and fake personality. AI proposes and tracks, but humans edit and control.
Landbase also targets general SMB businesses, not other high-tech startups. Saks wants to bring AI to “insurance brokers, commercial landscaping and managed service providers.”
Startups have a freemium model, which is a permanent freetier, for other agent startups, because token costs are unpredictable. However, the free version only allows businesses to automate their campaign planning and messaging. Running campaigns at scale using the platform requires a subscription that currently costs around $3,000 a month.