Airspeed raises $20m to let AI agents do the work after the sales call

On 4 June, Airspeed, a London-based maker of software for sales teams, announced a $20m (£14.9m) Series A led by DN Capital, with Framework Venture Partners, Atlassian Ventures and Vi Partners also taking part. The round came 15 days after the company dropped its original name, Glyphic, and relaunched on the argument that sales software should do the follow-up work itself instead of reporting on it.

Airspeed was founded by Adam Liska, its chief executive, and Devang Agrawal, its chief technology officer, who left Google DeepMind in 2022 to start it. Companies House records the company, still registered as Glyphic AI Limited, as incorporated on 10 May 2022, with the two founders as its only persons with significant control, each holding more than 25% but not more than 50% of the shares. In the company’s account of the round, Liska wrote: “Two people, one idea, a small WeWork office in London.”

The idea came from Liska’s work at DeepMind, where he had built an internal system that tracked research projects across the lab, flagged new papers and sent researchers lists of talks before conferences. What both founders saw, he wrote, was that “the gap between having data and doing something with it was enormous – and nobody was closing it.”

The round is a bet that the value in sales software is moving from capturing conversations to acting on them. For the sales leaders and managing directors of mid-sized firms who bought call recorders and pipeline dashboards over the past few years, it puts a different question on the table: how much of a rep’s after-call work the software removes, and how far a manager trusts an agent to change a deal record without a person checking it first.

From call notes to agents

Glyphic started as something closer to the tools it now argues against. In June 2023 it raised a $5.5m (£4.3m) pre-seed round led by Point72 Ventures, with The Creator Fund and Dhyan Ventures, to build what its announcement called an AI copilot that helps sales teams analyze customer interactions and pipeline.

When the company renamed itself on 20 May, it set out the shift: “For the last decade, GTM software has been obsessed with visibility – dashboards, recordings, analytics – on the hollow promise that if you can see a problem, you can fix it.” It said the name, inspired by hieroglyphics, had been chosen for an early focus on language, and that the team and the underlying product were unchanged. Airspeed now describes agents that update CRM records, flag risk on deals, draft follow-ups and coach reps.

Agrawal put the technical claim plainly in comments reported by UKTN: “Most teams retrofit AI onto legacy systems. We built the foundation from scratch.” The company has not published benchmarks that would let a buyer test that claim.

A round that began at a customer offsite

By the company’s account, the round started outside a boardroom. GetAccept, a customer, invited both the founders and DN Capital to its offsite in Sweden. Seeing “that intensity of customer love in person”, Liska wrote, was what got DN Capital excited enough to preempt the round.

Airspeed says revenue has grown four times year on year, the team has doubled and it is approaching 200 customers, naming Deepsea, Pricefx and Light among them. Those figures are the company’s own. It has not published revenue, so the multiple has no base to measure it against, and no valuation was disclosed.

The company says the money goes on three pieces of work: a context layer that feeds agents current information about how a customer’s business sells, wins and loses; orchestration of many sub-agents to pull patterns from every call across a large sales organization at once; and a single view of each customer drawn from the CRM, product analytics, email and ticketing. UKTN reported that the round will also pay for hiring and a larger presence in the US.

What the agents still have to prove

An agent that updates the CRM or chases a follow-up acts in the customer’s name, and a wrong entry can flow straight into a forecast. Airspeed’s ambition goes further than the sales floor: Liska wrote that the vision shared with investors is that “eventually all board meetings should run completely from within Airspeed”.

Closer to the present, Airspeed is asking revenue teams to let software write to the system of record directly. In the same UKTN report, Agrawal set Airspeed’s agents against tools that work from an out-of-date copy of a deal.

The funding gives the founders the money to show that it works at scale. DN Capital and its co-investors are now paying for the part of sales software that acts after the call. For Airspeed’s customers, the measure will be how often a sales manager has to undo what an agent wrote into the CRM.