Sable raises $45 million for AI sales employee Aiden
Sequoia Capital and 8VC backed Sable, a young startup whose AI agent runs product demos and answers buyer questions in real time.
By Hana Yoshida · Markets Reporter
3 min read
Sable has raised $45 million from Sequoia Capital and 8VC to build an AI sales agent called Aiden, Fortune reported. The startup is trying to replace the static website chatbot with software that can demonstrate products, answer detailed questions and work across languages during live buyer sessions.
Fortune reported that Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire was persuaded by a demo in which an AI sales representative guided a prospective customer through a product in English before switching into Mandarin and Spanish during the same conversation. Maguire told Fortune the experience reminded him of Stripe’s impact on payments.
Sable is less than a year old, according to Fortune. Its backers also include Valor’s Antonio Gracias, HubSpot cofounders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, and Cognition CEO Scott Wu as angel investors.
How Aiden works
Aiden appears on a company’s website as a shared online workspace that resembles a laptop screen, rather than as a small chat widget. According to Sable CEO Nim Ravid, the agent can operate the product while a buyer watches, and the buyer can also click through the experience.
Ravid told Fortune that Aiden can track what is happening on the page and join the conversation as conditions change. He argues that this makes the experience closer to a human sales engineer running a live walkthrough than to a scripted bot.
Sable trains Aiden using recordings of a customer’s strongest sales calls, company documentation and marketing materials, Fortune reported. The company’s goal is to create a reusable knowledge base that can support demos, onboarding and international expansion without rebuilding the system for each use case.
Fortune identified Notion and Decagon as early customers using Aiden in production. Notion operates a workspace platform, while Decagon sells AI tools for customer service.
A broader bet on AI agents
Sable is part of a wider push toward agentic AI, a category of software designed to take actions on a computer rather than only generate replies. Market estimates cited by Fortune put the global agentic AI market at about $9 billion to $10 billion in 2026, with some forecasts reaching $57 billion by 2031.
Fortune noted that Notion has been turning its workspace into a hub for AI agents and that Decagon has promoted an AI concierge for customer service. Sequoia partner Julien Bek has argued that services are becoming the new software and that future large technology companies may sell outcomes rather than tools, Fortune reported.
Ravid’s own pitch frames Aiden as software that can cover parts of four jobs: sales development, product demos, solutions engineering and customer-success onboarding. He told Fortune he sees that as a benefit for buyers, who can get help on demand, and for workers, who could manage groups of AI agents instead of repeating the same product explanations.
Ravid has also described Sable’s work in personal terms. Fortune reported that the Israeli founder lost friends at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 and later worked on cross-community dialogue groups at Harvard while involved in efforts to reduce campus polarization. He told Fortune he has spent years thinking about how to make AI models feel more human.
Sable still faces clear challenges. Fortune reported that trust, concerns about job losses and competition from larger companies remain obstacles, while Ravid said many buyers carry bad memories from years of poor chatbot experiences.
This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.