Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire still remembers the demo that changed his mind about Sable.
An AI sales representative walked a buyer through a product in English, then smoothly switched to Mandarin and Spanish mid-conversation. Maguire says it “reminded me of what Stripe did for payments.”
Sable is a startup less than a year old that is building an AI “employee” named Aiden who lives on a company’s website. Aiden can conduct live product tours and answer detailed questions in real time. The company has raised $45 million from Sequoia Capital and 8VC. Assets exclusively learned. The angels include Antonio Gracias of Valor, HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, and Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition.
Sable CEO Nim Ravid approaches AI tools from a human perspective. The Israeli founder lost friends at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 and later helped set up cross-community dialogue groups at Harvard while also working on efforts to reduce polarization on campus. He says he’s been thinking for years about “how to make these models more human.”
Instead of living as a little chat bubble in the corner of the screen, Aiden appears in a shared online window that looks like a laptop and actually controls the product while the shopper watches and clicks around too. It can independently see what’s changing on the page and jump into the middle of the conversation, which Ravid says feels more like a good human sales engineer walking a customer through a demo than a bot following the script.
Sable feeds Aiden recordings of a client’s best sales calls, internal documentation, and marketing materials to build a reusable “brain” that can enable demos, onboarding, and international rollouts, rather than starting from scratch each time.
This pitch has already attracted its first customers, including workspace platform Notion and AI customer service startup Decagon, where Aiden is in production.
The broader backdrop for Sable is that “agentic” AI — software that not only responds but also performs actions on a computer — has quietly become a global market of about $9 billion to $10 billion in 2026, with forecasts of up to $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 for an AI concierge for customer service, while Sequoia partner Julien Bek argues that “services are the new software” and that the next trillion-dollar company will sell results, not tools.
Sable wants Aiden to take on four human roles simultaneously: sales development, demo specialist, solutions engineer, and customer success onboarding. Ravid calls this a “win-win,” where buyers finally get a patient expert on call and humans dedicate themselves to managing fleets of AI teammates instead of having the same explainer conversations over and over again.
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 “crappy chatbot experiences.”
https://fortune.com/2026/07/16/ai-employee-that-convinced-sequoia-to-invest-45-million-in-sable-shaun-maguire/
