The math hasn't changed much. Salespeople, according to Salesforce's latest research, spend roughly 30% of their time doing what they were hired to do: sell. The rest—a stubborn 70%—gets consumed by everything else. CRM hygiene. Domain warmups. Calendar Tetris. Lead scoring that never quite scores the right leads.
Fil Twarowski saw it up close. As the first business hire at Pulley, running sales and growth, he watched talented reps drown in the administrivia. His co-founder, Eddie Eriksson, experienced the same grind on Pulley's growth team. By late 2022, they'd left to build Rift, a sales automation platform designed to claw back some of that lost 70%.
On July 24, 2024, the San Francisco startup announced it had raised $5 million in seed funding, led by Sequoia partner Stephanie Zhan. Y Combinator—Rift emerged from the Winter 2023 batch—and Soma Capital joined the round. The pitch was straightforward, if ambitious: consolidate the sprawling mess of sales tools into something leaner, something that actually frees up time.
The Persistent Drain
That 70% figure isn't new, and it isn't budging. Salesforce has tracked it across multiple editions of its annual State of Sales report, and the needle barely moves. The problem, Rift argues, isn't a lack of tools. If anything, sales teams are drowning in them—email sequencers, dialers, meeting schedulers, copywriting assistants powered by the latest LLMs. The issue is fragmentation.
Rift's early pitch, detailed in Sequoia's July 2024 investment memo, centered on bundling: one platform to handle email infrastructure, a built-in dialer, automated meeting scheduling, and AI-assisted copywriting. The goal was to eliminate what the founders call the "in-between" work—domain authentication, email warmup sequences, data cleaning, lead prioritization. All those invisible tasks that eat hours before a rep ever picks up the phone.
The company landed some recognizable early customers. Gusto, Capchase, Rhombus, and FlintK12 signed on. Sequoia cited one case: $300,000 in pipeline generated from a single sequence, though no timeframe was attached to that number. (Worth noting: pipeline generated and pipeline closed are very different metrics, and the memo didn't specify conversion rates.)
A Narrower Focus?
By early 2025, though, Rift's website tells a slightly different story. The current tagline touts "an intelligent calendar booking system that doesn't just schedule sales calls ... optimizes your time for revenue." That's a more focused promise than the all-in-one outbound engine Sequoia described. Scheduling logic and meeting routing, not the full toolkit.
Whether that represents a strategic pivot or simply clearer positioning isn't obvious from the outside. Rift hasn't made public announcements about product shifts. But the language suggests the company may be zeroing in on a narrower wedge—perhaps finding that calendar optimization resonates more than trying to replace an entire sales stack at once.
The timing aligns with a wave of consolidation across sales tech. Salesloft merged with Drift in February 2024. Apollo.io, which bundles prospecting data with sequencing, raised a $100 million Series D in 2023 and has reported strong growth since. Gong, the revenue intelligence giant, continues to pull in enterprise customers willing to pay for efficiency gains. The market signal: there's real money in making salespeople even marginally more productive.
Still Early, Still Quiet
Rift remains small—LinkedIn shows six employees as of recent data, though that count may lag. An October 2024 entry on Seedtable, a funding aggregator, lists a $12 million Series A, though the company has not made a primary announcement confirming the round.
That quietness could mean focus, or it could mean the hard slog of finding product-market fit in a crowded category. Selling sales tools to salespeople is notoriously tricky; they're simultaneously the most receptive audience and the most skeptical one.
The central question for Rift—and for every startup in this space—is whether the 70% problem is truly solvable with better software, or whether it's baked into how companies structure sales work. CRM fields still need updating. Leads still need vetting. Meetings still need prep. Perhaps the real challenge isn't that reps lack tools, but that modern selling has simply become more complex.
Still, Sequoia's bet suggests there's room to make a dent, even if the math doesn't flip all the way. Incremental gains matter at scale. If Rift can genuinely hand a few hours back each week, that might be enough. The question is whether they can do it in a way that doesn't just add another layer to the stack they set out to replace.
