Meet the AI employee that convinced Sequoia to invest $45 million in Sable
· Fortune
Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire still remembers the demo that changed his mind on Sable.
An AI sales rep 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.”
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Sable is a less‑than‑year‑old startup building an AI “employee” 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 cofounders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, and Cognition CEO Scott Wu are among the angels.
Sable 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 while working on efforts to reduce polarization on campus. He says he has spent years thinking about “how to make these models more human.”
Instead 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.
Sable 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.
That pitch has already landed early customers like workspace platform Notion and AI customer‑service startup Decagon, where Aiden is running in production.
The broader backdrop to Sable is that “agentic” AI—software that doesn’t just reply but takes actions on a computer—has quietly grown 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 and Decagon is pushing an AI concierge for customer service, while Sequoia partner Julien Bek is arguing that “services are the new software” and that the next trillion‑dollar company will sell results, not tools.
Sable 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.
Still, 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.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com