{"id":180436,"date":"2025-06-13T06:52:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T06:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/180436\/"},"modified":"2025-06-13T06:52:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T06:52:10","slug":"how-ai-sales-startup-landbase-nabbed-ashton-kutchers-sound-ventures-to-lead-its-30m-series-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/180436\/","title":{"rendered":"How AI sales startup Landbase nabbed Ashton Kutcher\u2019s Sound Ventures to lead its $30M Series A"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> of startups he finds interesting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought it was fake,\u201d Saks tells TechCrunch. But he replied anyway. \u201cSo I\u2019m getting ready for this call, thinking there\u2019s no way it\u2019s Michael Dell. And I\u2019m almost kind of laughing about it. It actually was Michael.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That interaction taught him a lesson that would prove vital for his current startup, Landbase<\/a>: When people know who you are, they answer your cold outreach.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Saks left AppDirect \u2014 which helps enterprise software companies handle recurring billing \u2014 about a year ago to found Landbase.<\/p>\n

Landbase does what Saks likes to call \u201cvibe GTM,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The product is powered by OpenAI\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u201ctrust\u201d in the sender. <\/p>\n

The reverse lesson from that Dell meeting? If people don\u2019t know who you are, they don\u2019t respond to your messages.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs 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,\u201d Saks told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n

The solution, he naturally believes, is to get the startup\u2019s name out there more, in \u201cvery targeted ways\u201d rather than \u201cspray and pray,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Before AI, doing that required bigger marketing budgets. With automation tools, companies can affordably run campaigns \u201cin minutes instead of months\u201d with fewer people.<\/p>\n

Saks took his own advice and built its own \u201cdigital trust,\u201d as Saks calls it, including creating content for YouTube<\/a>, and his personal website<\/a>. Then, using the Landbase product, \u201cwe went from 10 paid customers at the end of the year, in December \u201924, and we\u2019re now over 100 paid customers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

130 VCs reach out<\/p>\n

Landbase\u2019s Series A fundraise really proved Saks\u2019 thesis \u2014 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\u2019s World Labs, for instance.<\/p>\n

In September, Landbase raised its $12.5 million<\/a> seed from A*, 8VC,\u00a0Firstminute 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).<\/p>\n

The seed news suddenly put Saks on the Silicon Valley VC radar. \u201cBecause we were focusing on our digital trust, we started to get a slew of inbound from investors,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a meeting with Sound\u2019s Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, Sound won the deal when Kutcher suggested improving the startup\u2019s marketing tagline from \u201cintelligently automate your go-to-market\u201d to \u201cfind your next customer.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, despite raising $42.5 million, Landbase is entering a crowded market full of well-funded competitors like Regie.ai<\/a>, AiSDR, Artisan<\/a>, 11x.ai,<\/a> and the aforementioned ZoomInfo, not to mention incumbents like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, and more.<\/p>\n

Landbase differentiates itself by not pretending to be a human replacement, Saks says. It hasn\u2019t given its tech a human name and faux personality. The AI suggests and tracks \u2014 but a human edits and controls.<\/p>\n

Landbase is also targeting general SMB businesses, rather than other tech startups. Saks wants to bring AI to \u201cthe insurance brokers, the commercial landscaper, the managed service providers,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The startup has a freemium model \u2014 a permanent free tier \u2014 which is hard to pull off for other agentic startups because token costs can be unpredictable.\u00a0The 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\u00a0about $3,000 a month, with more pricing tiers coming soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Daniel Saks was working as a co-CEO of the previous startup he co-founded, AppDirect, billionaire Michael Dell…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3094],"tags":[7553,51,3134,46885,74279,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-180436","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-ai-sdr","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-entrepreneurship","11":"tag-picus-capital","12":"tag-sound-ventures","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114674738541882367","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}