Founder spotlight: OpenFunnel’s Fenil Suchak on selling first, building later

Fenil Suchak is the co-founder of OpenFunnel, a Y Combinator-backed startup that builds personalized AI agents to help companies find prospects and win customers. Instead of scouring slow-to-update databases for cold prospects and rarely hearing back, OpenFunnel’s agents source leads that show genuine interest in a go-to-market (GTM) team’s product, helping sales reps book 20x more meetings.

Rippling recently sat down with Fenil to chat about OpenFunnel’s software, why AI is changing the prospecting game, and how the conventional wisdom of “build first, sell it later” may have things backwards.

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How’d you get your start?

I met my co-founder, Aditya Lahiri, seven years ago at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India. We were hacking around in the early days of machine learning—before there were any large language models—and always wanted to build a business. 

While later working together on a GTM team at Oracle, we had trouble finding prospects. Traditional outbound methods of spamming the internet with 10,000 emails weren’t working. We’d get less than a one percent conversion rate. 

Instead of the ineffective, spray-and-pray approach, we realized we needed to find leads that showed genuine intent for our product. At first, we did this manually by scouring every channel and company blog post to find signals. But since we had a background in building personalized AI agents, we figured we could create a new prospecting tool that found those signals for us—and brought more personalization to our outreach. We’ve proved this to be possible. 

What’s new about what you’re making?

Relying on conventional, static GTM databases—like 6Sense, ZoomInfo, Demandbase, and Crunchbase—won’t always work, since they’re slowly updated by humans who don’t make changes in real time. With AI, the markets are moving extremely fast. You need to get to the right prospect when they’re warm. Our AI agents can treat the internet as a database and gather prospects, accounts, and research in real time. And since, unlike other agents, they’re personalized towards a specific vertical, they give our customers a competitive advantage. 

Who are your customers?

Our target customer is anyone on a GTM team, be it sales or business development representatives to growth or marketing employees. We look at our product as the only data source for our customers’ GTM needs. They can use it in multiple ways: outbound prospecting, account-based marketing, or assessing different product markets to fine-tune campaigns. 

Can you share a pivotal moment that’s impacted your company’s direction?

When we got accepted into Y Combinator, the first thing we did was quit our jobs, book flights, and move all the way from India to San Francisco. We left everything behind, found an apartment right beside the YC office, and went full-time on this. We’ve been working on it nonstop ever since.

Any advice for founders?

You don’t need to build first, sell later. Talk to your customers, figure out their pain points, and work backwards, making sure they want what you’re looking to build. This helps you build more personalized tools faster. With AI code-generating technology, building is the 1%  part—99% is talking to customers.