Polish angel investor Bartek Pucek — an early backer of startups like ElevenLabs, Ramp and Alokai (formerly Vue Storefront) — has cofounded a new startup, Proofs, to take on one of the biggest sales pain points facing API-first companies like Salesforce, SAP and Stripe.
The company uses AI agents to reduce the time to build proof-of-concept apps from months to minutes, according to Pucek, and it’s just raised a $2.6m pre-seed round led by German VC Earlybird’s Digital East Fund, which was an early backer of Romanian software giant UiPath.
“The way software was sold for the last 15 years will not be the same in the next 15 years,” Pucek says. “Our bet is that, in the future, the direct-to-prospect model, backed by AI agents, will be the go-to way of selling software. We would like Proofs to be the backbone of that.”
What does Proofs do?
Proofs tackles the slow and expensive process of building proof-of-concept (POC) apps for potential customers, one of the biggest pain points for API-first companies.
In the world of SaaS sales, POC refers to the process of building a small-scale version or prototype of your software to demonstrate its functionality, features and potential value to a customer, before developing it fully and deploying it.
Pucek says building a POC app can take months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so companies create them for only a small number of their prospects. That often leads other potential clients to hire external providers to do the job.
Proofs offers such companies AI agents — software that can complete full tasks from start to finish on behalf of a user — which can build POC apps from a customer’s request in minutes, for just a few hundred dollars (Proofs’ clients pay by usage).
The idea is that sellers can then serve more prospects and increase their conversion rate, and buyers don’t have to hire external providers.
“We’re starting off on the market of API-based companies but we’re really after the market of so-called software solutions partners and professional services — so the middle men who are a go-between in this process, who are dispensable. It’s about democratisation of the relation between prospects and the company that sells the software,” he Pucek says.
Pucek — who is Poland’s go-to person on everything AI, a community builder and an author of a weekly AI-focused newsletter — cofounded Proofs with Zbigniew Sobiecki, a serial founder and CTO. It currently employs eight people and is headquartered in Warsaw and San Francisco. The company wants to focus on expanding go-to-market and attracting new talent.
Who has invested?
- Earlybird Digital East Fund, a German VC
- Expeditions Fund, a Polish VC
- Step Function Ventures, a US VC
- RTP Global, a US VC
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/elevenlabs-angel-investor-ai-startup-news/
