Sequoia backs Sable’s $45M bet on AI-led product demos

Sable has secured $45 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and 8VC to develop Aidan, an artificial intelligence system capable of running live product demonstrations, answering customer questions in real time, and seamlessly switching languages during a single conversation. Founded less than a year ago, the company describes Aidan as an AI employee designed to handle everything from initial outreach to onboarding, effectively replacing multiple human roles in the sales process. Fortune broke the news on Wednesday.

Rather than operating as a passive chat widget in a website corner, Aidan takes control of a shared browser window, actively steering the product while the prospective buyer watches and interacts alongside it. Sable builds what it calls a reusable brain for each client by training the system on recordings of top-performing sales calls, internal documentation, and marketing materials. According to CEO Nim Ravid, the result feels closer to a human sales engineer than a scripted bot, because the AI can detect changes on the screen and adjust its presentation mid-demonstration.

Notion and Decagon, an AI customer-service startup, are already using Aidan in live production environments. The approach mirrors what Boston Consulting Group has done with its AI sales agent Jamie, which learns from a firm’s best and worst performers, though Sable focuses on the customer-facing side of the funnel rather than internal coaching. Sable’s core pitch is that Aidan can absorb the responsibilities of four distinct human roles: sales development, demo specialist, solutions engineer, and customer-success onboarding.

Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire said the demo “reminded me of what Stripe did for payments” after watching Aidan switch between English, Mandarin, and Spanish while guiding a buyer through a product. Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founder of 8VC, joins Maguire on Sable’s board. Angel investors include HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, Valor’s Antonio Gracias, and Cognition CEO Scott Wu.

The funding arrives as the agentic AI market , software that takes actions rather than just generating text , has grown to roughly $9 billion to $10 billion globally in 2026, with projections reaching $57 billion by 2031 according to Mordor Intelligence and Coherent Market Insights. Sequoia raised $7 billion for its largest-ever late-stage fund earlier this year, positioning AI as the firm’s central thesis under new leadership. Sable fits that thesis directly, betting that interactive AI can close the gap between what products can do and what buyers understand about them.

Whether Aidan can overcome the skepticism that years of mediocre chatbots have created remains an open question that Ravid himself acknowledges. Trust, job displacement, and competition from platforms like Notion’s own AI agents are real obstacles for a company asking enterprise buyers to hand their sales process to a machine. Sable is less than a year old, and the distance between a compelling demo and a product that reliably replaces human sales engineers at scale is one that many AI startups have promised to close and few have managed.