Most AI sales tools today are competing for the same highly visible companies: startups posting endlessly on LinkedIn, SaaS firms hiring aggressively, and tech businesses generating oceans of digital signals.
But according to Leadbay CEO and co-founder Ludovic Granger, a large part of the real economy remains largely invisible to modern prospecting software.
“The plumber, the HVAC contractor, the local manufacturer, the regional distributor - these traditional small and medium-sized companies are often excellent buyers, but they generate almost no digital signals,” he explained. “Regular prospecting tools simply don’t see them.”
That blind spot is precisely what Leadbay, a French-American AI startup backed by Y Combinator, is trying to solve.
The company, launched in 2023 by Granger and Milan Stankovic, recently raised $4.3 million in seed funding from investors including Y Combinator, Rebel Ventures, and Deel Ventures to develop what it calls an “inference model” capable of identifying small and mid-sized businesses that existing sales tools ignore.
But while the AI layer is ambitious, Leadbay’s real differentiator may actually be its go-to-market strategy.
Rather than behaving like traditional B2B software, the company is increasingly borrowing tactics from consumer AI products like ChatGPT and Claude - combining freemium onboarding, addictive usage loops, TikTok-style marketing, and community-driven adoption to spread through companies from the bottom up.
