Samay Kohli’s AI venture Budy.bot raises $4.2M led by RTP Global

AI platform Budy.bot has raised $4.2 million in seed funding round led by early-stage venture capital firm RTP Global. 

Other participating investors include BeeNext Pte Ltd, The Neon Fund, BITS SPARK Angels, and over 15 angel investors. Among the notable angels were Raju Reddy; Abhinav Asthana, CEO and co-founder of Postman; John Hayes, co-founder of Pure Storage; Bruno Kurtic, co-founder of Sumo Logic; and several former executives of GreyOrange.

The newly-raised funds will be utilised to fuel the training and development of Budy’s core AI skills, said the company in a statement.

Founded by Samay Kohli, founder of GreyOrange, Budy.bot streamlines the deployment and management of sales and marketing software stacks for enterprises.

“My experience in my last company was that in sales and marketing today, anytime you want to do anything, you keep adding more and more apps on top of your sales and marketing stack. As a result, any growth stage company ends up using anywhere between 100 to 150 different sales and marketing apps, which is really unfortunate.. because from operations and operating point of view, it becomes so complex,” Kohli told YourStory. 

By drawing his experience on scaling go-to-market strategies from $0 to $100 million in ARR, Kohli built Budy to assist growth-stage companies with annual revenues between $25 million and $200 million. These companies often face issues with setting up crucial systems and processes, like forecasting or improving sales efforts during rapid growth. 

Buddy.bot is launching at a time when several industries are adopting AI agents to handle specific tasks with minimal or no human intervention, leading to significant time and cost savings.

“I spent my last decade on automation and warehouses. I thought, why don't we look at it with the automation purview? What are the steps that can be automated and handed over to an AI agent so that the consultant can really concentrate on understanding the business, implementing the right change, and changing processes?” he explains. 

“The heavy lifting of all the tasks—from setting up things, logging in, and copying—all of that stuff can be done with the AI agent. And that's essentially what Budy does,” he said. 

“The power of agents is a lot dependent on tools. Tools are all the things that an agent can call on to be able to execute any of its tasks. The specific part we are spending time on is increasingly giving it more tools. We've been so far focused a lot on giving it tools around Salesforce specifically. Now we have been giving it tools on how it can move data from one system to another,” said Kohli. 

Currently, the company is working with select enterprise customers to tackle challenges like resetting Salesforce to fit the company's current needs while maintaining data, improving lead conversion, and enhancing revenue and cash forecasting.

Buddy.bot is currently serving a SaaS company with $12-13 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), which sells marketing software, and another company with $35 million ARR, which provides contact centre software to banks.

“This investment aligns perfectly with RTP Global’s focus on backing visionary founders in transformative sectors like AI. We believe founders with bold ideas can redefine industries, and supporting them early is crucial for driving innovation,” said Nishit Garg, Partner at RTP Global.