{"slug": "meet-the-ai-employee-that-convinced-sequoia-to-invest-45-million-in-sable", "title": "Meet the AI employee that convinced Sequoia to invest $45 million in Sable", "summary": "Sequoia Capital and 8VC invested $45 million in Sable, a startup building an AI employee named Aiden that conducts live product walk-throughs and switches languages mid-conversation. The AI agent, which has already been adopted by Notion and Decagon, aims to replace multiple human sales roles as the agentic AI market grows to $9-10 billion in 2026.", "body_md": "Sequoia partner [Shaun Maguire](https://fortune.com/2026/06/12/founders-fund-andreessen-horowitz-valor-and-the-biggest-vc-winners-from-spacexs-ipo/) still remembers the demo that changed his mind on Sable.\n\nAn AI [sales rep](https://fortune.com/article/what-are-the-jobs-most-exposed-to-ai-microsoft-researchers-list/) was walking a buyer through a product in English, then smoothly switching into Mandarin and Spanish mid‑conversation. Maguire says it “reminded me of what Stripe did for payments.”\n\nSable is a less‑than‑year‑old startup building an [AI “employee”](https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/ai-employees-org-chart-human-workers-blame-errors-bcg-study/) named Aiden that lives on a company’s website. Aiden can run live product walk‑throughs, and field detailed questions in real time. The company has raised $45 million from Sequoia Capital and 8VC, *Fortune* learned exclusively. Valor’s Antonio Gracias, [HubSpot](https://fortune.com/company/hubspot/) cofounders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, and Cognition CEO [Scott Wu](https://fortune.com/2026/07/07/cognition-ceo-tokenmaxxing-big-tech-carried-away-ai-productivity-gains) are among the angels.\n\nSable CEO Nim Ravid is approaching AI tools from a human angle. The Israeli founder lost friends at the Nova music festival on October 7 and later helped build cross‑community dialogue groups at[ Harvard](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/02/teaching-dialogue-across-differences/) while working on efforts to reduce polarization on campus. He says he has spent years thinking about “how to make these models more human.”\n\nInstead of living as a little chat bubble in the corner of the screen, Aiden shows up in a shared online window that looks like a laptop and actually drives the product while the buyer watches and clicks around too. It can see what’s changing on the page by itself and jump in mid‑conversation, which Ravid argues feels more like a good human sales engineer walking a customer through a demo than a script‑following bot.\n\nSable feeds Aiden recordings of a customer’s best sales calls, internal documentation, and marketing materials to build a reusable “brain” that can power demos, onboarding, and international rollouts instead of starting from scratch each time.\n\nThat pitch has already landed early customers like workspace platform Notion and AI customer‑service startup [Decagon](https://fortune.com/2025/09/28/how-is-arr-calculated-startups-venture/), where Aiden is running in production.\n\nThe broader backdrop to Sable is that “agentic” AI—software that doesn’t just reply but takes actions on a computer—has [quietly grown](https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/agentic-ai-market%5D%5Bhttps://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/industry-reports/agentic-ai-market) into a roughly $9 to $10 billion global market in 2026, with forecasts as high as $57 billion by 2031 as companies automate more of their customer‑facing work. Notion has turned its workspace into an[ AI agent hub](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/13/notion-just-turned-its-workspace-into-a-hub-for-ai-agents/) and Decagon is pushing an[ AI concierge](https://decagon.ai/blog/series-d-announcement) for customer service, while Sequoia partner Julien Bek is arguing that[ “services are the new software”](https://fortune.com/2026/04/21/services-are-the-new-software-sequoia-venture-capital-julien-bek-ai-native-eye-on-ai/%5D%5Bhttps://www.theaiopportunities.com/p/sequoia-capital-the-next-1t-company) and that the next trillion‑dollar company will sell results, not tools.\n\nSable wants Aiden to absorb four human roles at once: sales development, demo specialist, solutions engineer, and customer‑success onboarding. Ravid pitches this as a “win‑win” where buyers finally get a patient expert on demand and humans step up to managing fleets of AI teammates instead of running the same explainer calls over and over.\n\nStill, trust, job displacement, and competition from giants like Notion’s own AI agents remain real obstacles, especially for buyers who, as Ravid puts it, are still scarred by years of “shitty chatbot experiences.”\n\n**Subscribe to Fortune Gulf Brief**. Every Tuesday, this new newsletter delivers clear-eyed, authoritative intelligence on the deals, decisions, policies, and power shifts shaping one of the world’s most consequential regions, written for the people who need to act on it.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meet-the-ai-employee-that-convinced-sequoia-to-invest-45-million-in-sable", "canonical_source": "https://fortune.com/2026/07/16/ai-employee-that-convinced-sequoia-to-invest-45-million-in-sable-shaun-maguire/", "published_at": "2026-07-16 12:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-16 13:13:00.154291+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-startups", "ai-products", "ai-tools", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["Sequoia Capital", "Sable", "8VC", "Notion", "Decagon", "Shaun Maguire", "Nim Ravid", "Aiden"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meet-the-ai-employee-that-convinced-sequoia-to-invest-45-million-in-sable", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meet-the-ai-employee-that-convinced-sequoia-to-invest-45-million-in-sable.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meet-the-ai-employee-that-convinced-sequoia-to-invest-45-million-in-sable.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meet-the-ai-employee-that-convinced-sequoia-to-invest-45-million-in-sable.jsonld"}}