AI startup Optivian bags €1.7m to replace sales teams with autonomous agents
Helsinki-based AI startup emerges from stealth with backing from Silo AI co-founder, promising to end the need for linear sales headcount growth.
Text: Martti Asikainen 6.2.2026 | Photo: Optivian, Lari Järnefelt
A Finnish startup founded by the team behind employee communications platform Smarp is betting that artificial intelligence can finally solve one of enterprise sales’ most persistent problems: the fact that revenue growth has traditionally required hiring more salespeople.
European AI royalty backs execution layer play
Optivian has secured €1.7 million in pre-seed funding led by Failup Ventures and Tero Ojanperä, the former co-founder of Silo AI, which was acquired by AMD last year in one of Europe’s largest AI exits to date.
The company has also received support from Business Finland, the Finnish government’s innovation funding agency. The round values the company’s ambition to deploy autonomous AI agents that don’t just analyse sales data but actually execute the complex, time-consuming tasks required to close B2B deals.
The startup’s CEO, Roope Heinilä, who previously founded Smarp and later served as chief executive of Haiilo following a merger, says the motivation came directly from scaling bottlenecks he experienced whilst building his previous ventures to over €40 million in annual recurring revenue.
“We’ve spent billions on tools that tell us why we’re losing, but not on digital labour that actually helps us win,” Heinilä told reporters. “We are not building another sales tool. We are building the workforce of the Agentic Enterprise.”
Beyond dashboards: AI that does the work
Unlike traditional sales enablement software focused on forecasting and analytics, Optivian’s platform sits in what the company calls the “execution layer” – creating business cases, structuring mutual action plans, supporting internal deal champions, and continuously driving next-best actions.
The aim is to tackle the 80/20 problem that plagues enterprise sales organisations, where the top 20 per cent of representatives consistently generate 80 per cent of revenue.
Early results from design partners suggest the approach may have legs. Optivian reports an average 20 per cent increase in win rates and a 50 per cent reduction in time spent on administrative tasks and deal asset creation amongst early deployments.
The investor backing adds credibility to the firm’s claims. Ojanperä, who joins Optivian’s board alongside Failup Ventures general partner Topias Soininen, sees sales as prime territory for what the industry now calls “agentic AI” – systems that don’t just provide insights but take action.
“Agentic AI will not just analyse work, it will do the work,” Ojanperä said. “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 and what's next
In an unusual move that signals the company’s commitment to its own thesis, Optivian operates with an internal “AI Advisory Board” – a collection of persistent agent personas modelled on renowned founders and investors that debate strategy and pressure-test decisions alongside human directors.
The founding team includes Visa-Pekka Laurila, former COO and CFO at Smarp and Haiilo with McKinsey experience; Jesse Haka, former CTO of Feedtrail (which exited to Relias); and Johanna Rauhala, who served as Chief Product Officer and Managing Director for North America at Haiilo and Smarp.
The fresh capital will be deployed to further develop the platform’s capabilities and scale customer deployments as enterprises continue to scrutinise costs and productivity in an uncertain economic environment.
For Heinilä, who spent years watching enterprise clients including Google, Salesforce, and Amazon struggle with uneven sales performance despite massive investments in training and tooling, the opportunity is clear: “The problem wasn’t effort or talent,” he explained. “It was the weight of non-customer-facing work that slowed everyone else down.”
Whether AI agents can truly replace human sales professionals remains to be seen, but as cost pressures mount and AI capabilities advance, Optivian’s timing may prove prescient.
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