For decades, sales teams relied on roleplay to sharpen their skills. Managers staged mock calls, reps practiced handling objections, and everyone got a little better before heading into real conversations. But when remote work took over, those face-to-face sessions quietly disappeared. Many companies never replaced them, leaving salespeople to learn on the job in front of actual customers. The result was predictable: missed deals, shaky confidence, and underprepared teams.
Sriharsha Guduguntla, co-founder of Hyperbound, recognized that gap. As an engineer-turned-founder, he saw how much sales organizations were struggling without consistent practice. His answer wasn’t to bring back the old model, but to reimagine it with AI. Hyperbound gives reps a way to roleplay whenever they want, with feedback that feels as real as the conversations they face every day. The approach is already proving its worth. Companies using the platform are reporting sharper teams and millions in additional revenue. For Guduguntla, it’s confirmation that good sales training isn’t about theory. It’s about practice that’s accessible, scalable, and built for the way we work now.
Discovering AI Sales Coaching
Guduguntla never set out to reinvent sales training. He and co-founder Atul Raghunathan were engineers who built an AI sales coach for themselves, simply to learn how to sell. The turning point came at a conference in Times Square, surrounded by CROs and revenue leaders. Someone asked them a question that stopped the room: “How did you go from zero to $300K in ARR in just three months as engineers?” When they explained they had been using their own AI coach, the response was instant. “The common sentiment around the table was, ‘I want that, I want that,’” Raghunathan recalls. They shared their rough internal tool and were met with what he describes as “jaw-dropping reactions.” That was all the signal they needed.
Both founders grew up in the South Bay, immersed in tech from an early age. “When we were probably 10 or 11 years old, we already knew about Y Combinator. We used to read Paul Graham’s essays in high school,” he says. Getting into YC later felt surreal. “We thought we had no chance. Statistically it was maybe 1%.” Finding the right idea, though, was a long road. Guduguntla admits they went through “17 different ideas before we landed on Hyperbound. Hyperbound wasn’t even the 18th one. It was the 22nd or 23rd.” That persistence came with serious hustle. “We’ve done over 2,000 user interviews. We emailed 10,000 people cold, all hand-personalized. We messaged nearly 25,000 people on LinkedIn.”
Explaining Why Sales Leaders Embraced It
The beauty of their solution was its familiarity. Sales leaders already knew roleplays worked. “AI roleplays is not a new concept to them. Well, AI roleplays is new, but traditional roleplays aren’t. They’ve been doing this for decades,” Guduguntla points out. COVID had just made traditional practice sessions impossible. There’s another piece that resonated immediately. “My product team is moving a million miles an hour. They’re adding AI to every part of our product, and my sales team is not prepared to sell this,” Raghunathan explains, describing what he hears from sales leaders. “My enablement team of three people that I have for my 600 reps is not going to cut it. I need something scalable.”
Experiencing Overnight Viral Growth
When they launched in January 2024, things got crazy fast. “When we launched it, it went viral on every platform. LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, name your channel,” Guduguntla recalls. The viral moment happened overnight, literally. His phone started buzzing at 3 AM with notifications. “I check my phone and it’s all these people coming in and I go onto LinkedIn and I see that three different influencers had posted about us.” Their servers couldn’t handle the traffic. “I called up Atul, woke him up in the middle of the night, and I was saying, man, our server is down,” Guduguntla remembers. They fixed it, and by morning everything had changed. The company has been fully inbound ever since.
The growth has been impressive. They closed $1.4 million in revenue over 40 days recently. Their net revenue retention sits at 177%, meaning customers stick around and expand. “It’s not normal for a seed stage startup or even a series A startup to be closing these types of logos,” Guduguntla notes. They’ve landed LinkedIn, Monday.com, and Fortune 100 companies. Perhaps most telling, they hit $1 million ARR in 11 months doing founder-led sales. “We didn’t hire a first salesperson until we hit a million in ARR,” hs adds. They also made the smart move of hiring a CISO early. “That’s not normal for a seed stage company. But we knew who we were going after.”
Connect with Sriharsha Guduguntla on LinkedIn and visit www.hyperbound.ai to explore the future of AI sales coaching.
