Otto Sales AI Wins $500,000 at SaaStock USA 2026 Pitch Competition
Otto Sales AI, a self-driving CRM platform, won the SaaStock USA 2026 Global Pitch Competition at the Palmer Events Center in Austin, securing $500,000 from Backfuture VC, Quadri Ventures, BAG Collective, and OneSixOne Ventures. The company beat more than 100 competing startups.
Founded in 2026 by Omkar Pandharkame, Otto replaces traditional CRM dashboards with a voice-first system that calls sales reps each morning with personalized pipeline updates and priority actions. The platform processes emails, calendar activity, CRM data, market signals, and competitive intelligence to maintain what the company calls a "living memory" of each sales pipeline.
How Otto Works
Sales reps no longer manually enter data into dashboards. Instead, Otto's AI continuously monitors activity across multiple sources and delivers actionable intelligence through voice calls, not screens.
The system identifies three decisions waiting on each rep's pipeline each morning and updates itself when reps approve actions. Tanay Lakhani, Chief Product Officer, said the platform treats voice as the primary interface because "we learn to speak before we learn to read."
Alen Rafagudinov, Chief Technology Officer, described Otto as "the missing piece between the CRM and the work that actually happens," stitching email, calendar, meetings, and CRM activity into a single graph that updates nightly.
Early Traction
Otto launched in early access three weeks before the competition. The company reports 45 early adopters onboarding to paid plans this quarter.
During the pitch, Otto demonstrated its capabilities by calling Pandharkame in real time, delivering a pipeline update, and sending personalized insights to judges' inboxes within minutes.
Pandharkame said: "Winning at Austin was proof that the best sales tech ideas can come from anywhere. The future of sales is voice-first, self-driving intelligence."
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