YC-Backed Octolane Raises Seed To Build The Next AI Salesforce

Forbes

14-04-2025

One Chowdhury, Co-founder & CEO, and Md Abdul Halim Rafi, Co-founder & CTO
Octolane, the YC-backed startup behind the world's first self-driving AI CRM, today announced a $2.6 million oversubscribed seed round to take on Salesforce and reinvent the CRM category. Founded by two young immigrants, Octolane is building an AI-native system that eliminates manual CRM work and automates sales actions out of the box. The round includes investors like Brian Shin (early investor in HubSpot and Drift), Kulveer Taggar, Cindy Bi (CapitalX), Dave Messina (Pioneer Fund), Lan Xuezhao (Basis Set Ventures), Arash Ferdowsi, and General Catalyst Apex — all betting on Octolane to replace legacy, clunky CRMs with a faster, automated future built for modern sales teams.
Inside a San Francisco coffee shop Cafe Reveille, co-founder and CEO One Chowdhury, 23, is multitasking — reviewing pull requests between customer calls, a coffee-stained white shirt as his uniform. It's a typical Saturday, which he claims is statistically the most productive day at Octolane. Since dropping out of Duke University and moving to the Bay Area, this kind of hustle has become his normal — and investors are taking notice, calling the company 'Salesforce if it were built in the AI era.'
What makes this CRM startup stand out in a market dominated by industry giants is its reinvention of what a CRM actually does, transforming it from a passive 'System of Record' that demands constant manual updates into an intelligent 'System of Actions' that predicts and executes the next steps needed to close deals.
"The problem with traditional CRMs is they're glorified databases that force sales teams to spend hours manually entering data after every customer interaction. Most reps hate using them because they create work rather than reducing it", explains Md Abdul Halim Rafi, Octolane's co-founder and CTO.
Octolane's approach is fundamentally different, built around three core capabilities that no other CRM can deliver:
What's particularly impressive about Octolane's approach is its fine tuned LLM using synthetic data generation. This makes it possible to have a sophisticated architecture that goes beyond simply using OpenAI's GPT-4. "We've developed a hybrid approach", Rafi explains. "We combine OpenAI's capabilities with our Octolane Driver 3 model that's been specifically fine tuned on over 200,000 sales simulations."
This custom model specializes in understanding sales conversations, extracting structured data from unstructured text, and identifying subtle buying signals that most experienced salesperson might miss. The system ingests multi-modal customer interaction data, processes it through this specialized AI stack, and creates comprehensive "customer state vectors" – structured representations of each customer's current needs, concerns, and engagement context.
What's particularly striking about Octolane's strategy is its deliberately contrarian approach to the market. While most startups avoid direct confrontation with industry giants, Octolane is explicitly targeting companies already locked into established CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce - the equivalent of walking into a lion's den wearing steak-scented cologne.
"Everyone told me - and still tells me - that I'm completely delusional", One admits with a smile. 'Multiple potential investors said, 'You can't go after customers who are already locked into CRM systems. The switching costs are too high, and those companies have massive sales and marketing engines that will crush you."
He recalls one prominent VC who declined to invest, telling him bluntly, "It would be easier to convince people to switch religions than to switch from Salesforce". Chowdhury now occasionally begins his sales demo with this quote — usually followed by a series of screenshots showing dozens of customers doing exactly that.
Rather than chasing new companies with no existing CRM, Octolane deliberately positioned itself as a jailbreak for companies trapped in CRM prison. This David versus Goliath approach — which most industry experts considered suicidal — has proven remarkably effective. Of Octolane's 200 onboarded customers (with another 5,000 companies on the waitlist), the majority have defected from established players like HubSpot and Pipedrive, with several in the process of escaping Salesforce's ecosystem — something that industry veterans considered nearly impossible just a year ago.
This mission-driven obsession has created a working culture that feels like a time machine to Silicon Valley's earlier days. Octolane's Slack channels buzz at 3 AM. Morning standups happen on Sundays. Code reviews occur at midnight. Seven-day workweeks aren't mandated — they're volunteered.
In Silicon Valley, where work-life balance has become a recruiting tool, Octolane stands as a throwback to the Valley's forgotten religion - obsession.
"This isn't about 'grinding' or 'hustle culture,'" One explains. 'We're eliminating what might be the most soul-crushing part of modern work life: CRM data entry. That's worth missing some weekends because we don't want another sales rep missing their daughter's recital to update 47 fields in Salesforce.'
That mission has yielded real results. This investment in synthetic data has produced remarkable results and proves that they're onto something. In head to head testing in a controlled environment, Octolane's system achieved a 12% customer response rate - more than double the industry average of just 5.1% according to Belkins' 2024 analysis of over 6 million B2B emails. The system nearly doubled meeting booking success rates (10% versus the typical 5% for lower-intent leads reported in Crunchbase's 2023 Conversion Benchmark Study), while dramatically reducing administrative burden by 80% - transforming what HubSpot Research identifies as one of sales teams' biggest pain points by cutting CRM management time from approximately 5 hours to just 1.5 hours per lead.
What's most unusual about Octolane's $2.6 million round isn't just who invested, but the strategy behind it. "We tried to raise as little as possible", One explains with characteristic frugality. "Initially, we planned to raise just $2 million including YC funding. But then something strange happened."
That "something strange" was a flood of interest from major venture capital firms that Octolane largely resisted. The round was led by VitalStage Ventures' Brian Shin, an early investor in both Drift and HubSpot. Fondo's CEO David J. Phillips — one of Octolane's first users — wrote a check the day after One landed in San Francisco.
Octolane's cap table also includes powerhouses like Cindy Bi, Lan Xuezhao, and Kulveer Taggar — all first-generation immigrants like the founders. One says, "They didn't just commit to taking care of our company, they committed to taking care of us.'
He continues, 'These aren't just any investors, but individuals who bring extraordinary expertise to Octolane's corner.' For example, Cindy Bi, has developed a reputation for her uncanny ability to spot unicorns early, backing 14 billion dollar companies, 12 of them from seed stage.
She says, 'It's very obvious that Octolane has a very strong market pull from customers of all sizes that are eager to switch from HubSpot and that's how an AI-first Salesforce should be: a system of actions, not just records. Each interaction I've had with the team boosts my confidence because you can tell that nothing can stop them from 'earning" more customers from this $300B market cap opportunity."
Kulveer Taggar, a 2X YC founder with 2 exits (Auctomatic W07 and later Zeus in S11) mentions, '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.'
One Chowdhury's transparent "building in public" approach has been key to the company's rapid growth. In an era where startups operate in stealth mode until the "big reveal," One has taken the opposite approach - sharing every win, setbacks, existential doubts, and 3AM coding breakthroughs on X and LinkedIn with unfiltered honesty.
These aren't polished marketing messages but raw dispatches from the startup - complete with coffee stains, typos, and occasional frustrations. The result? Thousands of followers who feel like virtual co-founders, emotionally invested in Octolane's success.
"It's One's daily company updates on Twitter that caught my attention," says Octolane's early investor Cindy Bi, "I quickly visited Octolane's SF office on a Sunday. About half an hour in, I decided to invest after learning about One's journey to the U.S. (Duke University dropout from a full ride program), talking about his ambition, and checking their demo."
The Octolane story embodies Silicon Valley's original promise: two first-generation immigrant best friends who grew up with limited resources and taught themselves to code by watching YouTube videos. Now they're building AI technology sophisticated enough to challenge industry titans worth billions. It's the Silicon Valley dream distilled to its purest form - hard work and determination triumphing over entrenched power and privilege.
Their round closed in just five days - and looking back, One Chowdhury admits they could have done it in 24 hours if they'd wanted to. He never needed to create a pitch deck because the round closed so fast. Product demos proved far more compelling than any slides could have been.
The memory of receiving that YC acceptance call still brings a visible emotional response from One as he recounts it. It was an ordinary afternoon at Duke University in North Carolina when his phone lit up with a California number.
"When Harj Taggar, Managing Partner at Y Combinator, called to tell me we got in, I completely short-circuited," One recalls, laughing at himself now but clearly still moved by the memory.
The conversation itself became an unintentional comedy. "I actually had to ask Harj to repeat himself because my brain simply wouldn't process what he was saying. Harj probably wondered if he'd just accepted someone with serious hearing issues into YC."
What made YC particularly transformative for One and Rafi was the sense of finally finding their tribe. "For the first time, I thought - wow, these are actually our people," One recalls.
As the dust settles on Octolane's first funding announcement, the tech world watches with the same fascination reserved for high-stakes prizefights. In one corner stand the CRM giants - massive corporations with billions in revenue, hundreds of thousands of employees, and decades of market dominance. The tallest building in San Francisco is named Salesforce Tower, which dominates the skyline, a physical manifestation of their market position.
In the other stands a scrappy team of engineers led by two best friends who learned to code on YouTube, working seven days a week from coffee shops across San Francisco.
While traditional CRMs continue asking "Did you update your fields today?" like a nagging parent checking if you've done your homework, Octolane simply says, "Go help your customers. I've got this." And 5,000 companies waiting in line seem eager to hear exactly that.