Y Combinator-backed startup Origami Agents has raised $2 million in seed funding to build AI research agents that augment, rather than replace, human sales teams, breaking from the industry trend of AI avatars automating sales roles.

The San Francisco-based company, founded just four months ago, has already reached $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue during its eight-week beta period, making it the fastest-growing startup in Y Combinator’s current batch, according to its founders.

“Only humans can close big deals, but AI can make them much smarter and faster,” Kenson Chung told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. The 22-year-old dropped out of University College London‘s computer science program to co-found Origami Agents. The company’s AI agents perform the tedious research work that typically consumes up to three hours of a sales representative’s day.

The startup’s early traction offers a stark contrast to heavily funded competitors like 11x and Artisan, which have raised tens of millions to develop AI avatars that attempt to fully automate sales outreach. Origami’s founders argue that this approach often results in spam that damages customer relationships.

AI sales research: How Origami Agents is transforming B2B lead generation

One early customer seeing dramatic results is Stellar, a property maintenance marketplace that has grown its client base eight-fold in nine months, partly attributed to Origami’s technology. “The quality of the leads that we get is extraordinarily high,” said Matt Wetrich, Stellar’s CEO and former Uber executive. “My outbound email closes are four times industry average.”

Wetrich, who became an angel investor in Origami after experiencing their product’s impact, explained that the technology helps identify property management companies at the ideal size for Stellar’s services while filtering out poor fits — work that previously required significant manual effort from his team.

“Instead of it being like ground beef, and you gotta form it into something, it’s now like arriving as a steak,” Wetrich said, describing the quality of Origami’s leads compared to traditional methods.

The founding team brings relevant experience to the challenge. Prior to starting Origami, Finn Mallery built custom outbound solutions for more than 20 startups after working on go-to-market strategy at Fizz, while Chung served as CTO at an enterprise sales platform.

Why property tech companies are betting big on AI sales tools

Industry experts suggest that the timing could be right for Origami’s approach. While AI has begun transforming various aspects of business operations, its application in B2B sales remains nascent. “You’re just not going to recognize the world in three years time with this,” predicted Wetrich. “The gravy train is just departing.”

The seed funding will help Origami expand beyond its initial customer base in property management and real estate into other B2B verticals. The company’s agents can already analyze everything from product reviews to social media engagement to identify potential customers at their moment of highest buying intent.

“There’s enough information on the internet to know exactly who your perfect customers are,” said Mallery. “We’re realizing the power of the entire internet’s unstructured data by building a generalized solution any company can make use of.”

The future of sales: AI that works with humans, not against them

As debates continue about AI’s role in sales, Origami’s rapid growth suggests there may be more value in augmenting human capabilities than trying to replace them entirely. The company’s approach could offer a blueprint for how AI can enhance rather than eliminate human roles across other business functions.

“It’s not going to be a lot like a computer; it’s going to be a lot like electricity,” said Wetrich, comparing AI’s impact on sales to other transformative technologies. “Everybody lives and breathes and dies off of revenue. And if you can go find ways to go get more revenue… that’s what they empower you to do.”