Finnish AI startup Optivian raises €1.7m to automate enterprise sales with autonomous agents
Helsinki-based firm emerges from stealth with backing from Silo AI co-founder, promising to end the tyranny of linear headcount growth in B2B sales.
Text: Martti Asikainen 6.2.2026 | Photo: Optivian, Lari Järnefelt
A Finnish startup led by the team behind employee communications platform Smarp is wagering that artificial intelligence can finally crack one of enterprise sales’ most intractable problems: revenue growth has always meant hiring more bodies.
European AI veteran backs execution play
Optivian has closed a €1.7 million pre-seed round led by Failup Ventures and Tero Ojanperä, co-founder of Silo AI, which AMD snapped up last year in one of Europe’s largest AI exits to date.
The funding will support Optivian’s ambition to deploy autonomous AI agents that don’t merely crunch sales data but actually execute the tedious, time-intensive work required to close B2B deals.
CEO Roope Heinilä, who founded Smarp and later helmed Haiilo post-merger, says the impetus came directly from scaling bottlenecks encountered whilst building his previous companies to over $40 million in ARR.
“We’ve spent billions on tools that tell us why we’re losing, but not on digital labour that actually helps us win,” Heinilä says. “We are not building another sales tool. We are building the workforce of the Agentic Enterprise.”
Beyond dashboards: AI that ships
Unlike conventional sales enablement software fixated on forecasting and analytics, Optivian’s platform operates in what the company terms the “execution layer” – building business cases, creating mutual action plans, enabling internal champions, and continuously driving next-best actions.
The goal is to dismantle the 80/20 problem endemic to enterprise sales, where a small fraction of salespeople consistently generate the majority of revenue.
Early data from design partners suggests traction. Optivian claims a 20 per cent average uplift in win rates and a 50 per cent reduction in time spent on administrative work and deal asset creation amongst initial deployments.
The investor pedigree lends weight. Ojanperä, joining Optivian’s board alongside Failup Ventures GP Topias Soininen, views sales as prime territory for “agentic AI” – systems that act rather than merely advise.
“Agentic AI will not just analyse work, it will do the work,” Ojanperä notes. “Sales is one of the largest and most expensive knowledge functions in the enterprise. Automating its execution layer is a fundamental productivity shift.”
AI advising AI
In a meta twist that underscores the firm’s conviction, Optivian runs an internal “AI Advisory Board” – persistent agent personas modelled on world-class founders, investors, and operators that debate, challenge each other, and retain shared context over time, enabling leadership to pressure-test strategic decisions through multiple expert perspectives.
The founding quartet comprises Visa-Pekka Laurila, former COO and CFO at Smarp and Haiilo with McKinsey pedigree; Jesse Haka, former CTO of Feedtrail (which exited to Relias); and Johanna Rauhala, who served as CPO and North America MD at Haiilo and Smarp.
Together, they previously scaled three SaaS companies – Smarp, Haiilo, and Feedtrail – to over $40 million in ARR, serving enterprises including Google, Amazon, and Salesforce. The fresh capital will fund platform development and customer rollouts as enterprises scrutinise costs ever more closely amid economic uncertainty.
What's next
For Heinilä, who watched these blue-chip clients wrestle with uneven sales performance despite massive investments in training and tooling, the opportunity is stark: despite constant training and ever-growing tool stacks, a small fraction of salespeople consistently generated the majority of revenue.
“The problem was never effort or talent,” Heinilä explains. “It was the weight of non-customer-facing work that slowed everyone else down.”
Whether AI agents can genuinely supplant human salespeople remains an open question. But with mounting cost pressures and rapidly advancing AI capabilities, Optivian’s timing may yet prove astute.
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