Introducing Across AI: Transforming Business Critical Workflows with Agentic AI, Starting with Enterprise Sales
As someone who has carried a sales quota for 18 years, I've lived the challenges that sales professionals face every day. The countless hours spent understanding product nuances, researching accounts, and strategizing for prospect conversations often felt like navigating a labyrinth. Deep product and account knowledge gave me an edge, but it demanded an enormous investment of time and energy. As a sales manager, I relied on each team member to build a pipeline and execute processes at the highest level, knowing that any gap could mean the difference between closing a deal and missing an opportunity.
Today, I'm thrilled to announce the launch of Across AI, a startup born out of a passion to redefine how enterprise sales teams operate. Alongside my co-founders, Dr. Niloufar Salehi and Dr. Afshin Nikzad, we're building AI agents that reason over specialized memory for enterprise workflows, starting with B2B sales. Our mission is to empower sales teams with tools that not only understand the context of their deals but also harness the collective knowledge of their teams to provide expert-level strategy and tactics.
The Data Challenge: Unleashing the Power of Unstructured Data
Enterprises today are inundated with data. According to IDC, by 2025, the global data sphere will grow to 175 zettabytes, and an estimated 80% of this data is unstructured—emails, documents, presentations, and more—that's critical for business workflows. Despite this abundance, extracting actionable insights from unstructured data remains a formidable challenge. Traditional systems struggle to process and make sense of this information, leaving valuable knowledge untapped.
The GenAI Gap: Experimentation Without Production Deploys
In recent years, enterprises have been experimenting heavily with Generative AI (GenAI) technologies, eager to leverage AI's potential to transform their operations. However, the leap from experimentation to production has been elusive. ZDnet recently reported that Gartner predicts at least 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after the proof-of-concept stage by the end of 2025. This suggests ongoing challenges in moving AI projects, particularly generative AI initiatives, from pilot to production. This gap highlights a critical issue: existing AI solutions often lack the reliability and contextual understanding needed for complex, real-world applications.
The Opportunity: Rethinking Sales Workflows
Sales workflows, in particular, are complex and ripe for innovation. The sales tech landscape is vast, with over 700 sales tools available in the market, but many of these solutions offer incremental improvements rather than transformative change. The majority are point tools over traditional systems or add an industry specific flavor. And their vendors are rushing to adding "AI-wrapped" features. These solutions typically focus on discrete parts of the sales process—such as lead generation, email automation, or meeting scheduling—without considering the interconnected nature of the entire workflow. As a result these tools lack deep integration and fail to address the nuanced, more complex challenges sales teams face. By handling fairly isolated tasks, they miss the opportunity to optimize the end-to-end sales workflow architecture from the ground up. In contrast, a holistic approach that tackles the complete sales journey is essential for driving true innovation and efficiency.
Just as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) brought a platform shift to CRM tooling—transitioning software delivery to the cloud and revolutionizing accessibility—AI is poised to usher in the next significant transformation in sales technology. The global CRM market is projected to reach $263 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights, underscoring the immense potential for innovation in this space. AI has the capability to revolutionize how sales teams operate, offering intelligent, context-aware tools that enhance efficiency and effectiveness.
Meet the Co-founders
Our journey is powered by a team with a unique blend of expertise:
Steven Mih, CEO and Co-founder: With decades of enterprise sales experience, I've led successful startups as the former CEO of Ahana Cloud (acquired by IBM in 2023) and Aviatrix. My background includes leading sales teams at Couchbase, Transitive, and Cadence, giving me firsthand insight into the challenges we're addressing.
Dr. Niloufar Salehi, CPO and Co-founder: An industry-renowned researcher in human-centered AI, Niloufar is a UC Berkeley professor, leading groundbreaking research on AI system design, currently on leave. Her work shapes how AI can be integrated into complex workflows to boost reliability and augment human capabilities.
Dr. Afshin Nikzad, CTO and Co-founder: A specialist in advanced algorithms and machine learning models, Afshin holds dual PhDs from Stanford University and is a competitive programming gold medalist. Currently on leave from his professorship at the University of Southern California (USC), his expertise enables our AI agents to process nuanced contexts and provide actionable insights that adapt in real-time.
Our technology is rooted in years of academic research and supported by National Science Foundation grants. Together, we're uniquely positioned to tackle the critical challenges in today's sales technology landscape.
Backed by Visionary Investors
We're proud to announce that we've raised an oversubscribed seed round co-led by Village Global and Cota Capital.
Anne Dwane, Partner and Co-founder of Village Global, shares our vision: "At Village Global, we are dedicated to supporting innovative AI startups that address significant industry challenges. Across AI's 'enterprise-grade AI' can meaningfully reduce the hours sales professionals and managers spend updating pipelines, customizing pitches, benchmarking competitors, and manually advancing deals to closure."
Bobby Yazdani, Founder and Managing Partner of Cota Capital, adds: "Having been an early investor in Google, Dropbox, and many leading-edge enterprise technology startups, I closely follow the evolution of the enterprise technology landscape. Across AI's innovative agentic AI technology understands and leverages business-critical enterprise data and has the potential to transform how businesses work across the entire sales cycle. Cota is excited to support Across AI's visionary team on this groundbreaking journey."
We are also excited to be welcoming Adit Singh, Partner of Cota Capital and Anne Dwane to our board.
Their support not only validates our approach but also fuels our mission to transform enterprise workflows through innovative AI solutions.
Join Us in Shaping the Future of Sales Tech
As we accelerate our mission, we're actively recruiting passionate professionals to join our teams in San Francisco and Vancouver, Canada. If you're excited about working on pioneering technology in AI and making a tangible impact on how businesses operate, we'd love to hear from you.
Open Roles Include:
ML Engineering
Full Stack Engineering
Backend/Platform Engineering
At Across AI, we foster a collaborative and inclusive work culture where every team member has the opportunity to shape our products at an early stage. You'll be part of a dynamic team reimagining the future of sales tech with reliable AI, working alongside industry experts and thought leaders.
Interested candidates are encouraged to visit our careers page at https://across.ai/jobs for more information.
We invite you to join us as we build the tools we've always wished we had. Together, we can transform the future of enterprise sales.
Steven Mih, Nilou Salehi, and Afshin Nikzad
Co-Founders @ Across AI, Inc.