Persuasion Models Outperform Claude and ChatGPT | Dan Lee

Nooks raises $500m to automate sales without cutting reps

Nooks is betting that sales is the knowledge job AI augments without shrinking. Making a sales team more efficient makes companies want more selling rather than fewer people, and 12m Americans sell for a living. Persuasion is not verifiable and feedback is sparse, so Nooks fine-tunes its own open-weight models on billions of sales interactions rather than renting frontier ones. The $500m from General Catalyst funds agents across the revenue life cycle while humans keep the relationships.

Takeaways

• Nooks raises $500m to put agents beside reps. The $500m from General Catalyst is nondilutive, so Nooks keeps its equity while funding an agent for every rep. The money goes to less AI-pilled verticals, a New York go-to-market office, and expansion into the UK and Australia.
• Sales efficiency creates demand for more selling. 12m Americans sell for a living, more than all other knowledge jobs combined. Lee argues that in support or accounting, efficiency means fewer people, but a stronger sales team makes companies want more selling, so the profession has changed less.
• Nooks fine-tunes open-weight models to beat Claude. Nooks trains its own open-weight models on billions of proprietary sales interactions instead of renting frontier APIs, beating Claude and ChatGPT on sales benchmarks for cost, quality and latency. It also builds reinforcement learning environments and customer simulations to test hundreds of scenarios.
• Sales is less verifiable than coding for AI. Persuasion depends on what people think, which is not observable and gives sparse, delayed feedback, so frontier models have seen less persuasion data. Lee says sales is the richest dataset on persuasion and predicts models will get much better at it.
• Nooks runs agents across the revenue life cycle. The platform covers inbound, outbound, expansion and closing, and agents use the same tools as reps. Over 2,000 companies use it, from Cursor and Notion to Toast and ServiceTitan, and Lee's goal is a self-learning revenue system without an army of reps.
• Node is a proactive assistant for sales teams. Lee calls Node the first AI personal assistant for sales, purpose built for reps rather than adapted from a consumer tool. It is proactive and multiplayer, so reps, account managers, SDRs and solutions engineers each get their own Node.

What agents take over and what stays human

• Easy sales problems, such as demoing a product and holding a conversation, can be fully automated by agents.
• Hard persuasion problems, such as a deal with 20 stakeholders where you have not talked to 10, still need a human.