Revenue enablement platforms have been around for decades. Their original purpose was to empower customer-facing teams with all the content, training, coaching and buyer engagement tools they need to close more deals, close them quickly, and close them at higher values.
Over the years, however, incumbent platforms have lost sight of that goal, Ali Akhtar, founder and CEO of modern revenue enablement platform Letter AI, said.
Spending most of his career in AI consulting, product management and machine learning, Akhtar leveraged legacy enablement tools in his day-to-day work. He found them to be either overly burdensome content management systems or lightweight learning management systems. Each one failed to seamlessly bring content and learning together.
With a problem to solve and years of experience under his belt, Akhtar founded Letter AI in 2023 and never looked back.
Now, Letter AI, backed by TechNexus Venture Collaborative, is on a mission to solve one of the most practical and powerful use cases of AI.
How it works: Letter AI brings the initial vision of revenue enablement back to reality with an all-in-one platform for go-to-market teams to find, utilize and learn from AI-enriched content. Its platform ingests content with AI-powered metadata and utilizes a natural language interface to ensure that content is easy for teams to find and manage.
Customers can tap into that same content repository to get help from an AI co-pilot trained on their content, as well as receive interactive training before moving it downstream into customer interactions via RFP automation and an AI-powered sales room.
The future of AI solutions can be unclear at times. Akhtar said Letter AI, however, works properly, is accurate and demonstrates sophistication — three attributes that aren’t always a guarantee with an AI-powered platform. Its AI capabilities can be partially attributed to its early stages of high-speed development and customer feedback implementation.
“We started iterating as quickly as we could, as fast as our fingers could physically type on the keyboard to write code and check features,” Akhtar said about his team after they shared their early product with design partners. “Let’s keep iterating. Customer feedback. Iterate. Customer feedback. Iterate.”
Customer Obsessed: The startup's first year in business has been marked by growth. Akhtar said the company is seeing significant net retention and new logo growth with the number of seats nearly doubling in the first year. Staying hyper-focused on making customers happy has been Letter AI's ultimate north star and guiding principle, he said.
“If you have customers who enjoy what you're building, who have a need for what you’re building — fundraising is obviously important, all the other stuff that goes into building a startup is obviously important — but if you can nail that part, everything else just sort of falls into place,” Akhtar said.
Despite being much smaller than other competitors in the market, Akhtar said his team consistently hears that they are far more responsive to customers. Their team is known to respond in minutes.
In just one year, Letter AI has already announced public deals with Lenovo, Zip, Domo and Redpanda to name a few. The team has ambitious targets for both net retention and new customer acquisition in the coming year.
Akhtar is confident in the longevity of Letter AI. His focus has always been to solve active customer problems, and he has stayed true to that.
“Because AI is so new and it can do such magical things, you see all this noise in the market and all these new AI startups coming up seemingly every other day,” Akhtar said. “I think the ones that are going to be lasting companies are the ones that are still focused on solving practical use cases, practical problems.”
Funding: Letter AI raised a $2.7 million seed round in 2024 from TechNexus, Y Combinator, Formus Capital, Pioneer Fund, Soma Capital, and others.