‘Always been obsessed’: Las Vegas AI-powered sales automation firm gets $1M in investments

Countless companies specialize in sending automated bulk emails. But few, if any, specialize in managing replies. Until now.

RevReply is an artificial intelligence-powered sales automation platform that responds to sales leads automatically in an average of three minutes across email, social media and messaging services. The company, founded last year by Henderson resident Jay Wu and his business partner, Ramsey Al-Ramahi, received almost $1 million in investments after finishing as runner-up in the recent AngelNV “Shark Tank”-style competition that featured more than 160 companies.

“There are a lot of solutions that send out emails but there are very few companies that we can find that can help you when people start replying to those,” said Jeff Saling, co-founder of StartUpNV, the state’s business incubator and accelerator that launched the annual AngelNV event in 2021. “They will usually come back to whatever email box you sent it from and a whole bunch of those leads just essentially fall on the floor. Nothing happens to them.”

To help alleviate that problem, RevReply utilizes AI agents or agentic AI, a new class of AI that integrates with other software systems to complete tasks independently or with minimal human supervision. AI agents go further than generative AI such as ChatGPT, acting and making decisions in a way a human might, according to a study by MIT.

RevReply also recently received $200,000 in investments from Berkeley SkyDeck, the official startup accelerator and incubator of the University of California, Berkeley, that billed the company as the world’s first autonomous conversion system.

The company plans to use most of the investment funds to hire more technical talent.

“A big part of it is going to be the technical end of building the future of RevReply, which is the autonomous conversion system where we deploy dozens of specialized AI agents to find and execute the most optimal path to a conversion,” Al-Ramahi said. “While a lot of platforms focus on lead generation, RevReply strictly focuses on the lead conversion piece. We really help a lot of companies improve their conversions overall.

“More often than not, we are at least doubling companies’ conversions without adding anything more to the top funnel.”

Riipen, a work-based learning platform that is one of RevReply’s customers, almost tripled the amount of meetings it booked in the first month using the conversion system.

“I get giddy looking at their numbers,” Al-Ramahi said. “I’ve always been very obsessed with how do we optimize these conversions, tiny little details that most people don’t pay attention to.

“It was all not really possible until AI came out. That really opened the floodgates to what is actually possible.”

Apollo 2.0

RevReply has a stellar 4.9-star rating on the well-respected G2 business software review platform, where it is the youngest company on a list of 278 companies in its category. Al-Ramahi said it aspires to be a new and improved version of Apollo, a $1.6 billion AI-powered business to business sales platform and his former employer.

“They are pretty much a restaurant that has 1,000 things on the menu,” he said. “We do one thing and we do one thing really, really well, which is we optimize for the conversion, which is the most critical piece.”

Wu said one of the reasons he wanted to partner with Al-Ramahi is that he’s an exceptional visionary.

“He told me this RevReply that we are building is going to become Apollo 2.0,” Wu said. “We’re both very excited and motivated to really push this forward. I believe in Ramsey’s dream of creating this Apollo 2.0 and really pushing this RevReply to new heights.”

The co-founders met in 2023 on the Y Combinator co-founder matching platform.

“It’s kind of like speed dating for finding a founder,” Al-Ramahi said. “We both had met with dozens and dozens of people. Jay and I just hit it off. We were each other’s yin to the yang.”

Wu’s expertise is tech, while Al-Ramahi’s forte is sales.

“I’ve been in sales for my entire life. Ever since I came to this country at age 7 from Iraq,” Al-Ramahi said. “My dad drove an ice cream truck and I hopped in to help sell ice cream because he didn’t know English.”