YC's sales tech bets: verticals, signals, channels

If you've been in B2B sales long enough, you've seen the cycle: every year, a new wave of tools promises to fix something: prospecting, pipeline visibility, rep productivity, forecasting. Most of them end up doing roughly the same thing with a different UI and a fresh coat of AI branding.

But something interesting is showing up in the latest YC batches. The "build a broader, better sales platform" playbook seems to be running out of steam. The market for horizontal tools is saturated, and YC — which is usually a decent leading indicator of where founder and investor attention is shifting — appears to be funding a different kind of sales startup.

For context, I'm Rinat — I run getsally.io, a B2B outbound agency working with 25+ US and EU teams. So I'm watching this space with a natural bias toward lead generation through cold sales, but the patterns here go wider than cold email.

Most of the interesting sales startups from recent batches seem to be picking one of these three strategies.

This one feels like the safest bet. Instead of building for “B2B sales,” these companies build for a single industry and go deep.

Chasi is building a sales engine exclusively for industrial equipment dealers — pricing, spec matching, the entire sales cycle within that niche.

Kinro is an AI agent built only for insurance brokers.

Robby focuses on home services (plumbing, electrical, HVAC) and helps field technicians find upsell opportunities, preparing talking points right before a client visit.

In all three cases, the founders have deep industry backgrounds. That's hard to replicate from the outside, which is exactly what makes it a strong moat.

The idea itself isn’t new: track public signals (funding rounds, hiring surges, job changes, social activity) and reach out to prospects who are more likely ready to buy. Clay and dozens of others already do some version of this.

GojiberryAI does roughly the same thing — an outbound sequencer with signals and agents layered on top — but packaged it well for small teams and solo founders, and invested heavily in distribution. The result: $85K MRR, even though the feature set barely differs from competitors.

Autumn AI took a narrower path: they monitor GitHub activity and public SEC filings to catch the moment a dev team enters an active buying phase.

I'll be honest — this is the category I'm most skeptical about long-term. Any experienced salesperson already knows which signals matter for their specific ICP. And with AI coding assistants, it's increasingly easy to spin up a custom scraper or parser for a niche signal without buying yet another SaaS subscription.

But for now, effective go-to-market strategy still win in the short term, but the underlying value proposition feels vulnerable to DIY alternatives as technical barriers keep dropping.

Instead of competing on data quality or workflow automation — where the market is already crowded — some startups are going after channels where almost nobody is operating yet.

Chert is building outreach infrastructure for iMessage. The technical complexity of doing this properly is high, which is what keeps the channel empty. It’s worth noting that SMS outreach in the US is heavily regulated, so the compliance angle will be interesting to watch.

Pavoot is tackling events end-to-end: finding relevant attendees before the event, sending personalized invitations, capturing conversations during, and generating follow-ups with CRM sync afterward. The product is built for event hosts specifically, not for attendees mining conferences in the usual sense, so the value proposition still feels a bit unclear.

The channel play is appealing in theory because it sidesteps the noise problem entirely. You’re not competing for inbox space with every other outbound tool — you’re operating where the competition simply doesn’t exist yet. The risk is that these channels may be empty for a reason (regulatory, cultural, or just low buyer tolerance), and that advantage disappears fast once others figure out the technical challenge.

Caretta does real-time AI coaching during live sales calls — suggesting objection handling, relevant case studies, and timing cues while the conversation is happening. The natural next step for a product like this is removing the human from the call entirely, which is a trend I explored in a recent post.

Salesgraph takes a horizontal approach but aims at a specific pain point: when customer data is fragmented across Gong, Slack, and your CRM, reps waste 20 minutes before every call assembling context. The product aggregates the full touchpoint history and delivers a ready-made brief with suggested next steps.

• The “build a better Apollo” era in sales tech is fading — the market is too crowded for horizontal plays.

• The three lanes getting YC funding: hard verticalization, intent signal products, and owning underserved channels.

• Vertical plays with founder-market fit look like the strongest bet; intent signal tools feel the most vulnerable to DIY agent-built alternatives.

If outbound is on your roadmap this quarter, grab 30 min on my calendar. We built a sustainable cold sales pipelins for 100+ B2B sales teams in US and EU and generate 10-30 qualified leads/month for our clients.

Explore more case studies from SaaS and enterprise teams and see how structured outbound actually scales.