Octolane Thinks the Tallest Building in San Francisco Is Built on Broken Software

One Chowdhury was 21 when he dropped out of Duke and moved to San Francisco. He had no job lined up, no investors waiting. But he had one insight which was that everyone hated using Salesforce.

“If something sucks that badly and still has the tallest building in the city, there’s opportunity,” he figured.

That hunch just turned into a $2.6 million seed round for Octolane, the startup he co-founded with his best friend and fellow immigrant Md Abdul Halim Rafi. Their pitch? A CRM that updates itself, tells you exactly what to do next, and learns your style over time—what they call the world’s first “self-driving CRM.”

Since launching earlier this year, Octolane has signed up 200 customers, with 5,000 more on the waitlist. Many are defecting from Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive despite what every investor warned Chowdhury: “It would be easier to convince someone to switch religions than switch CRMs.” He now begins his sales demos with that quote.

From System of Record to System of Action

Traditional CRMs are passive. They wait for you to log calls, type in notes, and update fields after every meeting. Octolane flips that model. If a client emails, “We have a $200K budget and need 275 licenses,” the CRM automatically extracts seven data points from budget to timeline to new stakeholders without human input.

“It’s not a glorified database,” says CTO Rafi. “It’s a system that knows what’s happening and acts on it.”

That includes suggesting next steps based on real conversation context, writing emails in the rep’s tone, and adapting over time through a fine-tuned AI model called Octolane Driver 3.

Driver 3 was trained on synthetic sales data from over 200,000 simulations. It parses multi-modal customer interactions emails, meetings, notes and continuously updates structured “customer state vectors,” a dynamic map of where each deal stands and what to do next. It interprets deal momentum and executes actions in real-time.

In testing, this doubled email response rates (12% vs. 5.1%) and nearly doubled meeting bookings (10% vs. 5%), while cutting CRM admin time by 80%.

The $2.6 million round was led by Brian Shin (early investor in HubSpot and Drift), with participation from 18 angel investors, many of them first-generation immigrants like the founders. The list includes Lan Xuezhao (Basis Set), Cindy Bi (CapitalX), Shrug Capital, General Catalyst Apex, and several operators from leading AI and SaaS companies.

The round came together in five days without a pitch deck. Chowdhury sent a raw, unpolished product demo. “We weren’t optimizing for money. We were optimizing for the right people,” he says. “People who believe you shouldn’t spend half your day updating fields instead of talking to customers.”

One of those believers was Cindy Bi, who joined a Sunday demo after following Chowdhury’s honest, chaotic Twitter posts. Thirty minutes later, she wrote a check.

Octolane joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, but it wasn’t smooth sailing. “We had 11 interviews. Got rejected four times. We almost gave up,” Chowdhury recalls. But once they got in, it clicked: “It felt like finding our tribe.”

YC gave them validation and focus. Instead of raising a massive round, they raised just enough to stay heads-down and build with urgency.

Not a Better CRM But A Different Category

Rather than avoid competition with legacy players, Octolane is going straight at them—targeting companies already stuck in bloated CRM systems.

“This is jailbreak software,” Chowdhury says. “We’re freeing people from systems they’re stuck in. Nobody’s excited to log into Salesforce. We want them to log in and see what’s already done—and what’s next.”

Early customers like Retell AI say Octolane is replacing multiple tools and cutting sales team time in half. The goal isn’t to improve CRMs, it’s to eliminate the need for manual CRMs altogether.

Octolane has powered over 1 million contact lookups across 100+ companies—all without a single salesperson. Their product-led growth is built to let teams plug in, test, and deploy without calls or spreadsheets.

The platform delivers real-time enrichment, net-new contact discovery, and validation across email, phone, and job changes—all triggered by a single line of code. It pulls from structured and unstructured data, uses custom LLMs to process unstructured content like job posts and web pages, and feeds everything into a scoring engine that prioritizes trust and recency.

Competitors like ZoomInfo and Apollo offer data. Octolane delivers actionable, real-time intelligence, directly integrated into sales workflows—no bloat, no lag, no friction.

Octolane didn’t start out this way. The team originally built a recruiting tool. But users didn’t love it. They pivoted, this time building for themselves—for every founder and go-to-market team tired of tools that overpromised and underdelivered.

That clarity helped them land in YC and raise a total of $2.8 million, with follow-on backing from General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Immad Akhund (Mercury), and others.

Co-founder Sasi puts it simply: “We weren’t optimizing for money. We were optimizing for the ability to say no. That’s what keeps the product pure.”

A Different Work Culture

Inside Café Reveille in San Francisco, Chowdhury spends Saturdays toggling between pull requests and customer calls. The team works seven days a week not because of hustle culture, but out of obsession.

“This isn’t about skipping birthdays or glorifying burnout,” Sasi says. “No one should miss their kid’s recital to update 47 fields in Salesforce.”

Engineers ship without approval bottlenecks. Designers have time to think. Everyone’s aligned on one thing. Build what works, not what just demos well.

“We’re not trying to be the next Salesforce,” Chowdhury says. “We’re trying to be what Salesforce should’ve been if it were built today.”