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 ways” rather than “spray and pray,” he says.
Before AI, doing that required bigger marketing budgets. With automation tools, companies can affordably run campaigns “in minutes instead of months” with fewer people.
Saks took his own advice and built its own “digital trust,” as Saks calls it, including creating content for YouTube, and his personal website. Then, using the Landbase product, “we went from 10 paid customers at the end of the year, in December ’24, and we’re now over 100 paid customers,” he said.
130 VCs reach out
Landbase’s Series A fundraise really proved Saks’ thesis — and landed him one of the most connected AI investors in Sound Ventures. It has backed OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, Stability AI, and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, for instance.
In September, Landbase raised its $12.5 millio seed from A*, 8VC, Firstminute Capital, and others. Saks knew his seed VCs from his days at AppDirect. They were also impressed with the founding team, which includes CPO Emily Zhang (previously at Carta) and Chief Data Scientist Hua Gao (ZoomInfo).
The seed news suddenly put Saks on the Silicon Valley VC radar. “Because we were focusing on our digital trust, we started to get a slew of inbound from investors,” he said.
About 130 VCs reached out within weeks after the Series A news and the product launched, including Sound Ventures. When Saks was ready to raise an A, he booked 50 meetings with his top-pick VCs in whirlwind trips to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.
In a meeting with Sound’s Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, Sound won the deal when Kutcher suggested improving the startup’s marketing tagline from “intelligently automate your go-to-market” to “find your next customer.”
Still, despite raising $42.5 million, Landbase is entering a crowded market full of well-funded competitors like Regie.ai, AiSDR, Artisa , 11x.ai, and the aforementioned ZoomInfo, not to mention incumbents like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, and more.
Landbase differentiates itself by not pretending to be a human replacement, Saks says. It hasn’t given its tech a human name and faux personality. The AI suggests and tracks — but a human edits and controls.
Landbase is also targeting general SMB businesses, rather than other tech startups. Saks wants to bring AI to “the insurance brokers, the commercial landscaper, the managed service providers,” he says.
The startup has a freemium model — a permanent free tier — which is hard to pull off for other agentic startups because token costs can be unpredictable. The free version, however, only allows companies to automate campaign plans and messages. Using the platform to run campaigns at scale requires a subscription, which currently costs about $3,000 a month, with more pricing tiers coming soon.