Sable raised $45 million from Sequoia to build an AI that runs product demos instead of humans

Sable has raised $45 million from Sequoia Capital and 8VC to build an AI system called Aidan that runs live product demonstrations, answers customer questions in real time, and switches between languages mid-conversation. The company, which is less than a year old, calls Aidan an AI employee designed to replace not just chat support but the entire demo-to-onboarding pipeline. Fortune reported the funding exclusively on Wednesday.

Unlike the chat widgets that sit in the corner of most websites, Aidan appears in a shared browser window and actively drives the product while the buyer watches and clicks alongside it. Sable trains the system by feeding it recordings of a company’s best sales calls, internal documentation, and marketing materials, building what it calls a reusable brain for each customer. CEO Nim Ravid argues that the result feels closer to a human sales engineer than a scripted bot, because the system can see changes on the page and adjust its presentation mid-conversation.

Notion and Decagon, the AI customer-service startup, are already using Aidan in production. The approach echoes what BCG has done with its AI sales agent Jamie, which learns from a firm’s best and worst sellers, though Sable is targeting the customer-facing side of the funnel rather than internal coaching. Sable’s pitch is that Aidan can absorb four human roles at once: 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 walking a buyer through a product. Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founder of 8VC, joins Maguire on the 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 forecasts 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 is an open question that Ravid himself acknowledges. Trust, job displacement, and competition from platforms like Notion’s own AI agents remain 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.