David Cushman — HFS Research[00:21]
Hello and welcome to this HFS Hot Tech videocast with me, David Cushman, and Saurabh Mishra, the CEO and co-founder at OrbitShift. His firm has recently been named an HFS Hot Tech. Now, sales teams at technology and technology services firms are flooded with dashboards, intent alerts, and CRM updates, and yet they still struggle to prioritize the right opportunities quickly. Generic AI messaging has become table stakes, and while account research remains manual, inconsistent, and late, the gap between market signals and structured pipeline execution has become a structural weakness. HFS Research selected OrbitShift as an HFS Hot Tech for its ability to turn fragmented market signals into structured tuning, shaping, and pipeline execution through full-stack agentic orchestration. I get that there’s an important area that you’re delivering against here, but I wonder, Saurabh, how defensible all this is going to turn out to be, because, as we just mentioned, generic AI messaging has effectively become table stakes. Everyone from Gong and Clari to 6sense and hyperscaler copilots is now claiming an AI-assisted selling story — though not specifically about OrbitShift’s agentic architecture and the way you stitch hundreds of autonomous agents to 100 external data sources and internal CRM, collateral, and call intelligence. How much of all of that do you believe is going to be genuinely defensible over the next 12 to 24 months?
Saurabh Mishra — CEO and Co-founder, OrbitShift[01:41]
First of all, David, thank you for having me today in the conversation. I think what you’re asking is a great question, especially with the AI products flooding into the markets. First of all, it’s very important to understand that we are not a generic sales AI for everyone. We serve, David, a very specific segment. Our clients are the salespeople who are selling to enterprises in the upper end of the mid-market, which means that every interaction needs to meet a certain bar. Every action is well calibrated to make sure that the salesperson is managing the deal-shaping process very well. And that’s where OrbitShift plays, and there are key value propositions which really resonate with our clients. The first is being deeply contextual to the different segments we serve. So when we serve, say, an IT provider, our models are pre-trained on the nature of work an IT provider does, the types of deals they do, the decision-making process at the customer end — all of that is pre-trained, and therefore OrbitShift is instantly effective with the salesperson. So that is one deeply contextual layer to any segment, whether it’s an IT provider or enterprise software or the professional services firm we serve. The second unique value proposition for us is the very intuitive user experience. David, we are dealing with salespeople who have spent many years serving their clients — they know about the account pretty well — and what we are doing is basically helping the sales team, or our sales user, navigate the sales cycle for almost 80% of the value without putting in any search or looking for any word. OrbitShift just brings whatever is relevant to them — the insights, the ideas, the people — at a single click. So 80% of the value the salespeople can get by just a single click. They don’t have to do anything at all, right? So that’s a very important aspect of delivering a superior user experience. And the third thing which is important for our clients is a unique data lake which is our IP, and millions of data points get ingested on our platform on a real-time basis. It just simplifies the whole data and sales stack for our clients, but more importantly, given sales is all about external orientation, everything becomes very easy from a signaling point of view for the sales team. So those are the three things which, in my view, are not easily replicable, David, despite AI facilitating faster product development.
David Cushman — HFS Research[05:41]
Understood. OK, let’s talk about the impact of what you’re doing a little bit. Your customers are describing real outcomes. Meridius cited $200 million in influenced pipeline. I think Tech Mahindra were reporting a 40 to 50% drop in cold outreach with two to three times better engagement. But the onus is still on the seller to turn surface signals into a differentiated value proposition and actually make the sale. Where does OrbitShift draw the line today between what your agents own end to end — across accounts, marketing, knowledge, RFPs — and where does the human seller have to take over, and how is that line moving?
Saurabh Mishra — CEO and Co-founder, OrbitShift[06:21]
It’s a platform which, as you mentioned — a couple of anecdotes from some of the clients we’ve spoken with. Look, we are extremely proud to position ourselves as a platform which not only delivers enablement, but for us that’s the table stakes. OrbitShift means impact in terms of the pipeline and the bookings, right? And that’s what you heard from our clients as well. What is important to note, David — as I described earlier — is that we are serving users who are actually deeply invested in the accounts. They’re dealing with a few hundred thousand dollars, if not millions of dollars. And therefore our proposition to them is very simple: we have both assistive agents as well as autonomous agents. The assistive agents are for wherever you need a deep amount of judgment, the calibration on the actual deal scenario — whether it’s about account intelligence, account research, people intelligence, generating the sales pitch, and so on. But at the same time we give you the choice to deploy autonomous agents which can take care of the end-to-end process. So we have agents, for example, which can automatically update your account blocks — you don’t have to do anything on that front. Second, for example, say I serve five customers and there’s a new proposition which I want to reach out to and sound some of my clients out — I can actually just trigger the whole outbound outreach mechanism, in which the agent will automatically engage with the customers, set up the meetings, take the conversation forward, and bring me in when the conversation takes place. So for us, given the nature of the client we serve, it is a balance between the assistive and the autonomous agents.
David Cushman — HFS Research[08:36]
OK, so let’s talk a little bit about the future. Where is the model going next? OrbitShift has got a signal-rich approach and it plays strongest with larger enterprises, upper mid-market accounts where you’ve got meaningful public hiring and filings footprints. How are you thinking about extending into segments where there’s less information available, less external signal available to you? And beyond that, what should our viewers today expect from OrbitShift over the next 12 months in terms of new modules, deeper agentic capabilities, or expansion outside your current tech services and enterprise software core?
Saurabh Mishra — CEO and Co-founder, OrbitShift[09:15]
Look, David, for any of our clients our proposition is very simple: no matter which customers or accounts they are chasing, we tell them that we will give you the best possible intelligence and enablement available for that particular account. Very simple — the best possible that you can get anywhere in this world. And how we’re facilitating that is, as I mentioned, we have our own proprietary data lake in which we have multiple data providers through which we ingest the data on a real-time basis. And that helps us make sure that we are not only tapping public information, but also information which is privileged, right? And that could be, for example, a bunch of equity research reports, web search intent, the nature of hiring and the mandates the customers are serving — you just can’t get it through public sources alone. And this information is actually equally relevant whether it’s a large account or a small account. So our approach is to give the best possible experience and impact irrespective of the account size, and our customers — all of them — are happy, and that proposition resonates with them. To your second question, David, on how we are thinking about the roadmap — look, our vision and game plan is very simple. We want to become the backbone of the sales tech stack of our clients. 90% of the tools, data, and so on which they have — with OrbitShift, they don’t need it. OrbitShift becomes a single-stop platform for them. And therefore there are two things which we’re constantly doing to make sure that our clients’ efficiency and effectiveness keeps going. One is we are expanding the ambit of the sales process coverage. So for example, the RFP/RFI process automation is an important element for many of our clients. OrbitShift has very AI-native agents which take the RFPs and generate a 60% version-ready draft in 10 minutes, right? So we are constantly expanding the use cases. The second thing we are doing, David, is that as our users become more and more comfortable, we build more and more autonomous agents, with a very selective scope which our clients are comfortable with. And third is also the ability to build custom agents. So we are actually collaborating with clients — we’ve started collaborating with some of the large clients — where we say, look, we’ll give you the OrbitShift platform, but we’ll also build custom agents for you, to make sure that you’re developing your own IP without compromising the experience which your sales team has been living with for the last few years. So those are the three distinct directions on which we are evolving the product and our approach to serve the client’s data.
David Cushman — HFS Research[13:09]
Got it. And forgive me if I ask an additional question. You guys are in the world of supporting sales teams to make their sales — how do you look at the emerging world of agent-to-agent sales?
Saurabh Mishra — CEO and Co-founder, OrbitShift[13:32]
So we are already seeing some of that panning out, because I have a bunch of our clients talking about it. We have autonomous agents where people are selectively engaging with certain customers, and by the way, some of our customers are also managing those emails and calls on an autonomous basis. So it’s a very interesting exchange between our clients and their customers. We believe, especially for our segment, David, that people will start getting more and more comfortable in the entire deal life cycle. But given the gravity of the deals — large-size deals, the gravity of the impact they can create — this is going to be a bit slower than, for example, for SMB or the lower end of the mid-market. But from a capability point of view, David, we want to make sure that our clients have those capabilities as and when the world is comfortable, from an agent-to-agent interaction point of view.
David Cushman — HFS Research[14:35]
Understood. Thank you very much for your time and your insights, Saurabh Mishra. Have a great day.
Saurabh Mishra — CEO and Co-founder, OrbitShift[14:41]
Thank you, David.
