When Gaurav Bhattacharya realized his first startup wasn’t going to work, he did something rare in Silicon Valley: he shut it down, returned capital, and started over. Within months, that decision would set the stage for one of the most quietly explosive SaaS growth stories in the AI space.
Jeeva AI, the company Bhattacharya built out of the ashes of Involve.ai, wasn’t originally meant to be a business. It began as an internal tool, just something the sales team used to speed up outreach. But as generative AI matured and the team leaned in, they realized they had something bigger. Today, Jeeva has grown from a side project into a full-fledged AI platform for sales automation, now serving over 10,000 users and 300 enterprise clients. The company claims to have crossed $5 million in annual recurring revenue in just seven months since launching.
The premise is straightforward: sales teams should be spending their time building relationships, not researching leads or writing cold emails. Jeeva automates the repetitive and time-consuming parts of outbound sales, scraping contact data, enriching lead lists, personalizing email sequences, and managing follow-up. Its pitch is equal parts ambition and utility: let humans do the selling, and let AI do everything else.
The goal is not to replace salespeople. The goal is to make them exponentially more productive. That’s a key distinction in a market increasingly flooded with AI solutions promising full automation. Jeeva isn’t interested in eliminating the human touch as much as enhancing it.
Bhattacharya’s approach is pragmatic, even gritty. After folding Involve AI’s original focus on customer churn prediction, he laid off most of his 40-person team and rebuilt with just nine. The product they’d built internally to help drive sales became the company’s second act.
That flexibility has extended to how Jeeva operates. There are no long-term roadmaps or offsite strategy retreats. Bhattacharya describes his current leadership style as “wartime CEO.” He runs the business with short feedback loops, fast experiments, and day-by-day priorities. It’s not pretty, he admits, but in the rapidly shifting world of AI, speed matters more than polish.
The name “Jeeva” itself comes from Sanskrit and means “life” or “circle of life,” a nod to the founder’s belief that AI, like all revolutions, is cyclical. Technologies rise, fade, return. What’s valuable, he argues, is not just the novelty of AI, but how it’s used to solve real problems for real people.
And that’s where Jeeva’s customer base comes in. While the company has signed six-figure enterprise contracts, Bhattacharya seems just as excited about the solo sellers who buy Jeeva with their own credit cards. “I love those guys,” Bhattacharya said. “They’re like, I don’t care if my company buys into it or not… and I feel like they’re going to be so successful.”
In practice, Jeeva acts like a digital research assistant. It can scan a user’s inbox to identify leads that slipped through the cracks, auto-draft personalized follow-ups, summarize sales calls, or generate targeted lists based on natural-language prompts. Salespeople can upload trade show lists and have the system enrich them with phone numbers, emails, and LinkedIn profiles. It’s not just automation. It’s sales enablement on steroids.
Still, Bhattacharya is acutely aware of the ethical questions surrounding AI. A product that automates outreach and personalizes communication at scale could easily slip into spam, or worse, impersonation. But Bhattacharya’s background keeps him grounded. He grew up in a working-class household and watched his mother spend decades in blue-collar jobs. His personal goal isn’t just to build a successful company, he says, but to build one that creates opportunity for others.
His long-term vision? A million lives impacted. Ideally, through employment. “Instead of hiring 10 people, why don’t you hire 100 people and do 20 other things in your business that could grow even more?” Bhattacharya said.
That’s the fundamental bet Bhattacharya is making: that the future of AI isn’t about replacing humans, but amplifying them. Whether Jeeva becomes the next Salesforce or just one of many contenders in the AI-for-sales space remains to be seen. But in an industry obsessed with disruption, Bhattacharya’s vision of AI as an accelerant, not a threat, feels both grounded and unusually human.
And in today’s AI arms race, that might just be its greatest advantage.
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