Octolane, an AI-driven CRM that automates sales actions and CRM updates, has raised $2.6 million in a seed funding round from Y Combinator, Lan Xuezhao (Basis Set Ventures), and General Catalyst Apex.
Angel investors including Brian Shin (one of the earliest investors in both HubSpot and Drift), Kulveer Taggar, Cindy Bi (CapitalX) and Dave Messina (Pioneer Fund) also participated in the round.
The funds raised will be for for expanding its team and for infrastructure investments that will allow it to meet strong demand for its platform.
“Octolane’s daily company updates on Twitter caught my attention so I went to visit their SF office on a Sunday. About half an hour in, I decided to invest after learning about the founders’ journey to the U.S., talking about their ambitions, and checking their product demo. It’s obvious that Octolane has a very strong market pull from customers of all sizes that are eager to switch from Salesforce and HubSpot and that’s how an AI-first CRM should be: a system of actions, not just records. Each interaction I’ve had with the Octolane team boosts my confidence because you can tell that nothing can stop them from earning more customers from this $300B market cap opportunity,” said investor Cindy Bi.
“What drew me to Octolane was their rare combination of customer obsession and extraordinary output. They’re constantly shipping improvements based on real user feedback. One and Rafi understand that retention is the true north star in this space, and they’ve been bold enough to tackle the CRM category with genuinely fresh thinking. Seeing fast-growing companies switch to their platform validates that this approach is exactly what the market has been waiting for,” said investor Kulveer Taggar.
“I noticed Salesforce tower, and a friend told me, ‘It’s a big CRM software company that everyone hates. I thought, if everyone hates them, why do they have the tallest building in San Francisco? I did some research and found that while Salesforce was viewed as very disruptive at its launch decades ago, it was now viewed as obsolete – AI has passed it by. I called Rafi, and we decided to build an AI-driven, sales-focused CRM from scratch that would eliminate the need for salespeople to manually update their CRM recordkeeping – something that typically eats up to two-thirds of a salesperson’s time, leading to late nights and lost time with family,” said One Chowdhury, Founder, Octolane.
Founded by One Chowdhury and Md Abdul Halim Rafi, Octolane is an AI-driven platform that automates sales actions and CRM updates. Octolane’s AI-native self-driving CRM updates itself and takes action, so sales reps can spend less time on admin and more time closing deals.
Backed by Y Combinator, General Catalyst Apex and prominent angels like Brian Shin, Kulveer Taggar and Cindy Bi, Octolane helps companies shorten sales cycles, increase win rates, and let reps do what they do best: sell.
Octolane, launched earlier this year, has 200 active customers with 5,000 more on a waitlist.
