Landbase: How AppDirect Co-Founder Daniel Saks Raised $42.5M to Fix Cold Outbound With AI

TL;DR: Landbase is an agentic AI go-to-market company. It helps sales teams decide who to contact, what to say and when, then runs much of the outreach for them. It was co-founded by Daniel Saks (CEO), Hua Gao and Emily Zhang, and is based in San Francisco. Saks previously co-founded AppDirect, the B2B marketplace company he ran as co-CEO for many years. Landbase has raised $42.5M as of November 2026: a $12.5M seed in September 2024 and a $30M Series A in June 2025, co-led by Sound Ventures and Picus Capital. As he shared on the show, Landbase now holds data on 40 million businesses and 400 million business profiles. Saks told the story, and shared what works in cold outbound today, on The Product Market Fit Show. The episode aired on October 12, 2026.

A note on sourcing. Anything labeled "as he shared on the show" comes from the interview and has not been independently confirmed. Funding, founder and acquisition details labeled with a date were checked against company announcements and press coverage in November 2026.

What does Landbase do?

Landbase sells software for outbound sales. It answers three questions for a sales team: which companies and people to go after, what message to send, and which channel to use. It can then run email and LinkedIn outreach automatically and gives reps a dialer for calls. As Saks explained, it does not place AI voice calls, because of regulatory hurdles.

The company was built for AI agents from day one. Older tools like ZoomInfo and Apollo make a person filter lists by hand inside their own software. Clay lets a technical "GTM engineer" pull many data sources into tables. Saks said Landbase indexes its data so an agent can reason over it directly. Customers can connect their CRM, call recordings and win-loss records, and Landbase works inside Claude Code and Codex.

Key stat: as he shared on the show, Landbase covers 40 million businesses, 400 million business profiles and about 1,500 fields per record that customers can use as custom signals.

The core product is a model. Landbase's first model, GTM-1 Omni, was trained on transaction data from real outbound campaigns, which the company accessed through partners.

"And we trained our AI on what works and what doesn't. And we were able to prove about a 4 to 7x uplift in efficacy for outbound campaigns." — Daniel Saks, Landbase

Saks also described an internal benchmark, modeled on the software-engineering benchmarks used for coding AI. Landbase tested list precision against Apollo, ZoomInfo and Clay. As he shared on the show, Landbase's precision came out more than 2x higher. That is the company's own test, not an independent one.

Key stat: as he shared on the show, customers see 2x to 4x higher connect rates and meetings-booked rates across Landbase's network.

Who founded Landbase?

Landbase's co-founders are Daniel Saks (CEO), Hua Gao (Chief Data Scientist) and Emily Zhang (Chief Product Officer), per company and press materials as of November 2026.

Gao has a Stanford PhD in machine learning. He was on the founding team of EverString, which ZoomInfo bought. On the show, Saks said that team ended up driving about a third of ZoomInfo's revenue. Gao now runs Landbase's applied AI lab in Silicon Valley.

Before Landbase, Saks spent more than a decade building AppDirect. He started it in his early twenties. As he shared on the show, he and his co-founders were 23 or 24 when they pitched their first big customer. AppDirect lets telecoms, software companies and other channels resell cloud services to their business customers. Saks said it now powers a large share of B2B app marketplaces and that its customers' transaction volume is upwards of $10 billion in gross merchandise value. He served as co-CEO for many years, then handed the role to his co-founder. He is still on AppDirect's board.

The move to Landbase came from timing. In 2023, AI was early, and Saks said it was unclear how it would show up in business applications. He picked sales because revenue was the hardest problem he faced at AppDirect.

"So I wanted to start a business that really solves the biggest pain that I went through." — Daniel Saks, Landbase

He never liked the label "AI SDR," because he would rather help human sellers than replace them.

How much has Landbase raised?

Landbase has raised $42.5M in total as of November 2026, based on two announced rounds.

• Seed, September 2024: $12.5M. Landbase came out of stealth with this round. It was co-led by A*, 8VC and Firstminute Capital, with participation from Inovia Capital, Picus Capital and General Catalyst's La Famiglia, per the company's Business Wire announcement.
• Series A, June 2025: $30M. Co-led by Ashton Kutcher's Sound Ventures and Picus Capital, with 8VC, A*, Firstminute Capital and TheGP participating, per the company's June 12, 2025 announcement and TechCrunch. The money went toward its GTM-1 Omni model.

No valuation has been disclosed.

Landbase has also been buying. In August 2025 it acquired Adauris, a lead-generation startup, per SiliconANGLE and a Business Wire release.

Key stat: $42.5M raised across a $12.5M seed and a $30M Series A, as of November 2026.

What did AppDirect teach Daniel Saks about product-market fit?

Saks defines product-market fit as "magnetic momentum." You win one customer, tell the story, and the next ones come to you.

"So what I like to describe product market fit as is the feeling of magnetic momentum." — Daniel Saks, Landbase

His first big customer at AppDirect was Bell Canada, around 2009 to 2011. AppDirect pitched at a Bell innovation day against much larger enterprise vendors, including IBM. The team showed up in suits with printed decks. Saks said they won because they had a concrete story for how Bell could make money from cloud.

Then the team spent about two years in a windowless room with 10 engineers building the Bell app store. Bell had about 500,000 business customers in Canada, as he shared on the show. Bell's leadership expected huge traffic.

"And after crunching to get this thing launched, we launched on time. It was like crickets. No one came to the App Store." — Daniel Saks, Landbase

A few weeks later, Harley from Shopify, one of the early apps on the store, told him the Bell store had less traffic than his intern's blog.

Saks named the mistake plainly.

"And the mistake we made is we actually only worked with Bell and it was about a year enterprise sales cycle." — Daniel Saks, Landbase

The team learned two things. First, merchandising: telecoms are trusted for telecom, video conferencing and security, not for every kind of software.

"I think what we've learned with B2B technology, and this still extends today, is that businesses want to buy from people they trust." — Daniel Saks, Landbase

Second, channels: instead of hoping billboards drove people to a website, AppDirect trained the telecoms' human sales teams to sell the products. When Deutsche Telekom and AT&T launched later, they saw strong results. And the Bell deal still did its job as a beachhead. Because of Bell, AT&T, Comcast and Deutsche Telekom reached out. AppDirect later used the same playbook in new verticals, for example landing Honeywell to enter IoT and manufacturing.

Even so, Saks said it took five to seven years to get the flywheel going on transaction volume, the company's top metric.

How does Landbase find product-market fit today?

Saks believes fit is never won once.

"Product market fit is not something that you don't have and then you have. It's something that you always have to work for within given micro segments." — Daniel Saks, Landbase

At Landbase, one of the strongest pockets of pull has been fractional SDRs. These are independent callers, often with big LinkedIn followings, who find their own clients and have to build their own lists. Saks said Landbase got one of them using the product, that person told friends, and now a network of these sellers uses and promotes it. He was clear that this niche is too small to build a giant company on alone. The plan is to dominate it, then move to the next adjacent segment with bigger contracts or a bigger market. He credited this "dominate a small niche, then expand" idea to Peter Thiel, whose firm Mithril invested in AppDirect, as he shared on the show.

What works in cold outbound, according to Landbase's data?

Saks laid out a step-by-step approach.

1. Build a living TAM map. Know every segment, company and person you could sell to. At AppDirect, around its Series C, Saks said the company paid a consulting firm a few hundred thousand dollars for a static market map. Today he would have an agent build it from your CRM, call recordings, win-loss notes, website and competitors, then keep it updated.

2. Score and tier it. Saks personally covers about 100 top accounts, targeting the CEO or CRO, often with custom case studies, a pre-built TAM map for that prospect, and an offer to meet in person. His team covers the middle tier. The lowest tier runs on autopilot through email and LinkedIn.

3. Expect honest numbers. As he shared on the show, across millions of messages a good email list usually gets about a 2% response rate. A tight, strong list can reach 8% to 10%. Brands like Rippling and Ramp may reach around 20%, but that is rare. Phone is similar: many teams sit at about a 2% connect rate, and the right list can lift that to 8% to 10%.

4. Stop at three touches. Landbase tested sequences of email, calls and LinkedIn. Three touches get about 90% of the result, Saks said. Going to five adds maybe 10% more but risks spam flags. People who do not reply can go dormant for about a quarter before the next round.

5. Earn credibility before you reach out. One Landbase SDR, Max Wu, has about 10,000 LinkedIn followers. A prospect looked him up mid-call and decided he was legit. Saks also said Landbase spent about a year getting a verified blue checkmark on its email domain, which lifted conversion.

He also explained why AI-written email is not automatically doomed.

"But I think what's happened in the last year is the spam filters have gotten way better at filtering out bad messages and putting in good. It's not just if the message is generated via AI or not. That's not how they distinguish it. It's actually, you know, the relevance and the, you know, credibility of the domain." — Daniel Saks, Landbase

The teams that win, in his view, go narrow instead of spraying volume.

"The ones that are seeing most success are really thinking about how do I really hyper-target the right company and the right people with the right value proposition at the right time." — Daniel Saks, Landbase

For more on early sales motions, see founder-led sales and when to hire your first sales rep.

Key lessons from Daniel Saks's playbook

1. Do not bet everything on one enterprise deal. AppDirect spent about two years and one long sales cycle on Bell, and the launch drew almost no traffic. Spread early risk across more than one customer. 2. Use each win as a magnet. The Bell logo brought AT&T, Comcast and Deutsche Telekom to AppDirect. At Landbase, one fractional SDR brought a whole network. Tell the story of the first win loudly. 3. Do not run outbound until people can look you up. Saks tells startups to build a strong online presence first. Scaling a weak message burns your domain and gets you flagged as spam. 4. Test at low volume, then scale. He treats outbound like product-market fit: the first message, channel or target is probably wrong, so experiment small until you feel pull. 5. Hire callers, automate the rest. He estimates that 10% or fewer SDRs truly love calling. Automate list building, research and email, and hire for calling DNA.

For a deeper look at how proprietary data becomes an edge, read startup data moat.

Listen to the full interview: He has cold outbound data on 40 million startups. Here's what works.

FAQ: Landbase

Q: What is Landbase? A: Landbase is an agentic AI go-to-market platform based in San Francisco. It helps B2B sales teams find the right companies and people to target, write the messaging, and run outreach across email and LinkedIn. Its core model is called GTM-1 Omni.

Q: Who is the CEO of Landbase? A: Daniel Saks is co-founder and CEO. He previously co-founded AppDirect and served as its co-CEO. His Landbase co-founders are Hua Gao, Chief Data Scientist, and Emily Zhang, Chief Product Officer.

Q: How much funding has Landbase raised? A: Landbase has raised $42.5M as of November 2026: a $12.5M seed in September 2024 and a $30M Series A in June 2025. No valuation has been disclosed.

Q: Who are Landbase's investors? A: Sound Ventures and Picus Capital co-led the Series A, with 8VC, A, Firstminute Capital and TheGP participating. The seed was co-led by A, 8VC and Firstminute Capital, with Inovia Capital, Picus Capital and General Catalyst's La Famiglia participating.

Q: What companies has Landbase acquired? A: Landbase acquired Adauris, a lead-generation startup, in August 2025.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

• Daniel Saks, Landbase — the AppDirect co-founder who learned product-market fit from a Bell Canada launch that drew no traffic, and now runs an AI go-to-market company built on data from millions of outbound messages.

Listen to the full episode at pmf.show for the complete story.

Last updated: November 2026