Jeff Seymour and Pradeep Bangalore, neighbors-turned-co-founders, are aiming to address one of the biggest challenges in tech sales: making first contact with a potential customer. It’s a pain point Seymour encountered firsthand when working as an account executive.
The co-founders’ solution is Softsellr, a Triangle-based startup that provides a platform built to improve how account executives, sales alliance teams, and sales managers break into target accounts.
What Seymour and Bangalore had identified was a cold start problem in tech sales. Too often, salespeople make cold calls and send cold emails that go nowhere because they lack the insights and warm introductions needed to connect with the right people. “Step zero,” as Seymour called it, is often ignored: getting accurate account intelligence and landing a warm introduction.
Most companies invest heavily in training reps on products and processes, often presenting elaborate multi-step sales frameworks while offering little support on how to actually get the first meeting. That leads to the typical cycle: cold emails and calls, poorly positioned automated outreach, and annoyed upper and middle management in the buyer corporations.
“Sales leaders think the process starts after you get the meeting,” Seymour said. “But if your team can’t reliably open those doors, the rest doesn’t matter.”
Softsellr’s solutions
Softsellr is tackling the issue head-on with a model built around collaboration. Instead of relying on brute-force outreach, users join private groups, called “packs,” centered on specific companies. Within each pack, sales professionals working the same account can exchange notes, share relationship context, and, most critically, make warm introductions.
The packs aren’t limited to internal teams. Rather, they’re made to include external partners, alliance reps, and even sellers from other companies targeting the same account, as long as there’s mutual benefit.
To further sharpen their platform’s edge, Softsellr is incorporating AI-powered tools that enhance account intelligence and streamline collaboration within packs. The AI analyzes communication patterns and historical data to surface the most promising contacts and suggest ideal warm introductions.
The startup’s AI also helps sales teams prioritize outreach efforts by identifying accounts showing the strongest buying signals. This intelligent automation reduces wasted time on dead ends, making the “step zero” process Seymour alluded to smarter and faster.
Growing Softsellr
Rather than charging per seat or at a flat rate per company, Softsellr sells access per account pack. Companies pay based on how many accounts they need to cover (such as 50 existing clients and 100 new targets) and can distribute access across as many team members or alliance partners as needed.
Effectively, companies pay for 50 packs and get 100 additional ones on the house, encouraging expansion into new accounts and, ultimately, new sales. Softsellr’s leadership said the model will also create a psychological incentive: Teams are motivated to unlock value from the extra packs by chasing new accounts.
“There’s a dynamic there that everyone in sales management gets and motivates them and aligns them,” Seymour said, “And there’s a dynamic that gets the teammates aligned to begin helping each other, more than they are now.”
That model, they argue, better reflects how the sales business actually works. Large deals often involve multiple reps, overlapping relationships, and external partners, none of which fit neatly into a one-seat-per-user model.
Softsellr officially launched in July and is in early conversations with enterprise customers. The team is prioritizing quality over scale for now, with a goal of making their first paid users “jump out of their shoes” with satisfaction.
“If they’re not bringing other teammates and partner orgs into the platform, we’ve misread the situation,” Seymour said.
The team is sure that this software is something the industry needs. Furthermore, over the course of a few years of interviews with everyone along the tech sales pipeline, they have built and refined a platform that users actually want.
Long-term outlook
Long-term, the founders envision Softsellr changing the very nature of B2B outreach. As an alternative to the cold-outreach arms race powered by AI automation, they want to normalize a more thoughtful, collaborative process built around trust.
QUICK BITS
Startup: Softsellr
Co-Founders: Jeff Seymour, Pradeep Bangalore
Founded: 2024
Team size: 6
Location: Cary
Website: www.softsellr.com
Funding: Raising via Angels and VC
Seymour and Bangalore envision a future in which Softsellr is so widely adopted that companies can commit to a new standard—no unsolicited outreach unless there’s real value for both parties. This approach especially benefits buyers, who won’t have to wade through countless irrelevant cold contacts to find what actually matters.
That may be a long way off, but the roadmap is already in place. The team is targeting a seed round in early 2026 and expects to close initial paid pilots before the end of this year. They’re betting that if they can make those first users deeply successful, momentum will take care of the rest.
