Partnering with Sable: Closing the Diffusion Gap
Sequoia sbarry ● Covered by 2 sources
Sequoia just backed Sable, a startup whose AI "employee" Aidan runs live sales calls with vision and voice. It's meant to close the gap between what AI can do and what companies actually understand.
Based on reporting by Sequoia, sbarry — read the original for the full story.
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There's a weird lag in the AI economy right now. Labs push out new capabilities monthly, but most big companies are still catching up on last year's model. Sequoia's Shaun Maguire argues the real bottleneck isn't raw intelligence anymore, it's getting customers to actually grasp what these systems can do for their business. That's the gap Sable is trying to close.
The product is Aidan, described as the first AI employee, and it doesn't just answer questions in a chat window. It joins customer calls directly, using voice, video, real-time browser interaction and vision to demonstrate a product live rather than describe it in a deck. Notion and Decagon are already using it to walk prospects through their own agent tools, alongside unnamed large enterprises. Sable has been operating for less than a year and already has over 150 companies on a waitlist, which is the kind of number that gets a VC's attention fast.
The founding team, Nim, Leon, Linda and Itamar, met at Harvard studying post-training, reinforcement learning and multimodality, then went off to SpaceX, Google, Meta and Together AI before regrouping. Nim, the CEO, gets singled out for recruiting talent most startups can't touch, ten Harvard alumni, former quant traders, an International Math Olympiad winner or two. That's a heavy hiring bar for a company building what is essentially a customer-facing AI agent, but the technical problem is genuinely hard: low-latency browser control, live vision processing, and handling a human and an AI talking over each other in the same call.
Sequoia led Sable's seed and co-led its Series A, which tells you where the firm thinks enterprise AI spending goes next. Not toward smarter chatbots answering support tickets, but toward AI systems that behave like staff, sitting in meetings, learning a customer's specific goals, and closing the understanding gap one demo at a time. Whether that scales the way Sequoia hopes depends on whether enterprises actually trust an AI to run their highest-stakes sales conversations, which is a bigger leap than the technology alone.
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