START: Ludovic Granger, CEO & Co-Founder, Leadbay: "Qualified leads for agentic workflows"

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Most sales teams are competing for the same companies. Not necessarily because they're the best customers, but because they're the easiest to find.

They have LinkedIn profiles, public hiring activity, and enough online signals to show up in every prospecting database.

But plenty of good businesses don't leave that kind of trail.

Ludo Granger kept noticing this when visiting customers. He'd look at their prospect databases and find that he could sometimes identify roughly three times as much additional market opportunity.

The companies were there. The sales tools just weren't finding them.

A hotel, a restaurant, or an early-stage startup might be a perfect customer. But if it's not generating the right online signals, it can be almost invisible to traditional prospecting software.

That became the problem Ludo wanted to solve with Leadbay.

Instead of relying only on the signals everyone else is tracking, Leadbay tries to learn how a good salesperson evaluates a company.

It looks at your business, identifies what a promising customer might look like, and uses feedback from the leads you pursue to get better over time.

But Ludo isn't trying to build another database with more companies in it.

He thinks the way salespeople use databases is changing altogether.

During SF Tech Week, he used Claude from his car to work with five highly qualified prospects rather than sorting through thousands of accounts. Then he told the agent how to handle outreach and follow-ups.

That's the distinction he's betting on. Finding more companies matters, but knowing which ones are worth pursuing matters more.

Especially when the person making that first decision isn't a person anymore. It's an agent.

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🎙️ Ludovic Granger, CEO & Co-Founder, Leadbay on Fondo START with Guest Host: Kamran Karic, COO & Co-founder, Ploid (YC F26)
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01:42 Why everyone is chasing the same companies

02:08 The untapped market traditional sales databases overlook

02:34 How Leadbay can expand a company's addressable market

02:51 Why startups should build something agents want

03:17 The shift from human interfaces to AI agents

03:48 How AI identifies promising businesses with limited online data

04:19 Teaching AI to recognize and improve lead quality

05:01 Finding five highly qualified prospects instead of 5,000

05:29 Trusting AI agents to coordinate outreach and follow-ups

07:04 Why qualified data is the fuel for AI-powered sales

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Check out leadbay.ai