Jianna Liu (@jianna_liu) and Devishi "Devi" Jha (@DevishiJha) launched Cardinal as an AI revenue platform on Thursday, expanding an outbound sales product that the repeat Y Combinator founders built after selling their previous startup to Johnson Controls.
https://x.com/jianna_liu/status/2082858765393797625?s=46 Liu said in a thread on X that companies including Deepgram, Giga and Mintlify use Cardinal to "design how they sell." Cardinal finds prospects, monitors buying signals and social activity, generates personalized messages, coordinates outreach and retargets engaged leads with ads. The software can run campaigns across email, LinkedIn and X, with teams managing and reviewing the work in Slack. (x.com)
The launch turns Cardinal's earlier precision-outbound pitch into a broader claim over the revenue stack. Five months ago, Cardinal described itself on Y Combinator's launch directory as an AI platform that replaced a collection of more than 10 sales tools and the work of a dedicated go-to-market engineer. That product was already running outbound for more than 40 YC companies, Cardinal said at the time. (ycombinator.com)
Cardinal's current product covers lead discovery, account filtering, shared-context research, personalized snippets, multichannel sequences and inbound-signal capture from website visits, product signups, social engagement and advertising. Its website also advertises CRM integrations, team analytics and hands-on support from Cardinal. (ycombinator.com)
From energy software to sales agents
Cardinal is the second startup Liu and Jha have built together. Jha studied computer science at Harvard, while Liu graduated from MIT with a computer science degree and previously worked on software teams at Meta, DoorDash and Nvidia. Their first company, Leafpress, used AI to collect and analyze utility data for corporate energy and carbon reporting. The founders took Leafpress through YC's Summer 2023 batch and later sold it to Johnson Controls, according to their current YC profiles. (ycombinator.com)
Selling Leafpress shaped the founders' next product. Cardinal says Liu and Jha won customers including Lindt and Honeywell through cold outbound, giving them firsthand experience assembling the prospecting, enrichment, messaging and sequencing systems they now package for other companies. (ycombinator.com)
The path to Thursday's launch included a sharp product change. Cardinal first launched publicly as a document-intelligence API, built after Liu and Jha struggled to extract structured information from utility bills at Leafpress. The founders said the API used two fine-tuned models to convert complex documents into Markdown and code while preserving tables, annotations and layouts. (ycombinator.com)
That document product remains accessible through Cardinal's API documentation, while Cardinal's main website has shifted its sales pitch to outbound automation. The Revenue Platform label gives the founders room to move beyond prospecting and sequencing into advertising, inbound qualification, content monitoring and sales operations. (docs.trycardinal.ai)
Cardinal also operates with a heavier service layer than the usual self-serve software vendor. On its company page, Cardinal describes its model as "half-software, and half-service." Liu, Jha and their staff help customers connect existing systems, configure agents around proven sales plays and monitor performance through Slack. That delivery model can speed adoption for small teams without a go-to-market engineer, though it also ties growth to Cardinal's ability to hire people who can design and manage sales systems. (trycardinal.ai)
Cardinal's traction claims
Earlier this year, Liu said Cardinal had raised more than $5 million from Y Combinator, Audacious and operators including Ironclad CEO Geoff Donaker. Cardinal has not broken out the financing into named rounds. (linkedin.com)
Liu also said more than 50 YC companies were using Cardinal and that its campaigns had generated millions of dollars in customer pipeline. Jha separately said Cardinal reached a seven-figure annual recurring revenue run rate in roughly three months with its two founders. Those figures are company-reported, and pipeline measures potential deals rather than booked revenue. (linkedin.com)
The founders are hiring engineers, a designer and a founding account executive in San Francisco. Cardinal's job listings offer up to 1% equity for some early roles, reflecting how much of the product still depends on codifying sales work that Liu and Jha currently perform themselves. (ycombinator.com)
Liu's launch thesis is straightforward: AI has reduced the time required to build software, leaving distribution as the constraint. Cardinal is the founders' attempt to turn the outbound methods they used at Leafpress into repeatable agents for other startups. Its broader revenue-platform positioning raises the stakes, placing Cardinal against established CRM and sales-engagement systems as well as newer tools such as Clay, Apollo and Instantly that already occupy pieces of the same workflow.