A Year-Old Startup Built SI That Hunts Sales Leads. It’s Now Worth $1.3 Billion.

Every big company has the same unglamorous problem. Somebody has to figure out who might buy, dig up what that customer needs, write the email, book the meeting and keep the deal from going cold. For decades that was the grind of a sales rep with a phone, a spreadsheet and a login to Salesforce.

A San Francisco startup called Rox says software can now do most of that legwork, and investors just valued it at $1.3 billion for the idea. The company is about a year out from its launch.

Rox raised $100 million in a Series B round on Wednesday, the company told Fortune. General Catalyst and March Capital led the round. Existing backers Sequoia Capital and Factory put in more, and Databricks Ventures and Prosperity7 Ventures came in as new investors, according to the company’s announcement. Fortune also listed Google’s venture arm, GV, among the returning investors. The startup had raised $50 million across its seed and Series A rounds in November 2024.

A salesperson that never logs off

Rox calls its product a “revenue agent.” In plain terms, it is SI that sits on top of a company’s existing systems and does the prep work a sales team used to do by hand. It researches accounts, decides who is worth calling first, drafts the outreach, qualifies leads, books meetings and helps manage deals once they are open.

Co-founder and CEO Ishan Mukherjee laid out the pitch in a long post on 𝕏, and he used three customers to make it concrete. None were named.

A Fortune 500 medical device maker uses Rox to find rural hospitals that just landed new funding, then has it prepare everything a rep needs to win the business, down to a joint funding proposal. Mukherjee said that work produced $200 million in potential deals and $24 million in signed business within months.

One of the three biggest payroll companies in the country uses it to reach millions of small businesses, “like your local pizza shop,” he wrote. The reps “just show up to the meeting,” and he said the cost of winning each customer fell 80%.

A global IT services firm, he said, built more than $300 million in qualified potential deals in eight weeks.

Altogether, Mukherjee said customers have closed more than $7.5 billion in revenue since they started working with Rox. Those are the company’s own numbers, and no outside firm has checked them. The same goes for the growth figures in the announcement: yearly recurring revenue up more than 10 times since launch, existing customers spending more than seven times what they first paid, and some customers seeing about 25 times their money back within 90 days.

Named customers in Fortune’s report include the fintech company Ramp, MongoDB, New Relic, the commodity trader Trafigura, the chip startup Groq and America’s Auto Auction.

Aiming at Salesforce

The bigger story is who Rox is going after. Salesforce, the company that has owned the sales software business for a generation, brought in $41.5 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year, Fortune noted.

Mukherjee says that model is getting old. Before Rox, he built a startup called Pixie Labs, sold it to New Relic for roughly $150 million in 2020 and became New Relic’s chief growth officer. He told Fortune that running a public company through COVID taught him “every business relies on Salesforce specifically and their CRM to run their business,” and that it “was not the futureproof approach as AI was about to hit scale.”

His argument is simple. Old sales software stores information. Rox wants software that acts on it.

In an interview clip posted Wednesday by MTS, he went further and took a swing at the whole idea of selling SI as a time-saver. “Deploying AI and agents where you’re measuring the success by hours saved per employee per week, that is dead,” he said. He said big buyers have spent three years on Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce’s Agentforce, and “it never really moved the needle.” What they want now, he said, is software that can “ship revenue.”

Salesforce isn’t standing still. It says its own Agentforce product has passed $1.5 billion in yearly recurring revenue, according to Business of GTM, and it already lives inside the system Rox plugs into. That is the fight Rox just raised $100 million to win.

Who built it

Rox was founded in 2024 by Mukherjee, Shriram Sridharan and Diogo Ribeiro. Sridharan is the company’s chief technology officer, and Fortune reported that Mukherjee was a product lead on Apple’s Siri Knowledge Graph. The company’s own site also lists Stanford computer scientist Christopher Ré, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, as a co-founder for research.

Marc Bhargava, a partner at General Catalyst, told Fortune his firm first invested before Rox had a product or a dollar of revenue, calling the company “a talent magnet.” Mukherjee says the company now has about 50 SI researchers in San Francisco.

“Rox is the product I wish I had,” he said in the announcement. “Our own go-to-market runs entirely on Rox, with no other tools.”

Where the money goes

Rox says the new cash will pay for more research, custom models and testing systems, and a push into health care, industrial companies, financial services and energy. It also plans to grow its U.S. sales, marketing and commercial team fivefold next year, which is a little ironic for a company selling software that does sales work.

Mukherjee’s next promise is even bigger. “Soon you’ll tell Rox ‘Generate $50M in opportunities,’” he wrote, “and it will figure out how.”

Whether a sales team can really be handed a target and an SI agent and told to go is the question this money is supposed to answer. For now, the people writing the checks are betting a lot of salespeople are about to get a very fast assistant.