Canvas

What do they actually do

Canvas provides an AI-driven outbound service for sales and GTM teams. You define your ideal customer profile and targeting rules, and Canvas’s agents find matching prospects, enrich them using many data sources, draft personalized messages, and run multi‑step outreach across email and LinkedIn. When a lead meets pre‑set qualification rules, Canvas books the meeting directly on your reps’ calendars source.

It’s a live, early-stage product with demo booking, sign‑up, and an app live on their site. Public messaging emphasizes AI “research agents,” enrichment from “20+ data sources,” multi‑channel sequencing, and objection handling, positioning Canvas as an “outbound partner” so reps can focus on closing rather than prospecting and scheduling source. YC lists the team and open roles, signaling the company is early and actively building source.

Who are their target customer(s)

• Early-stage Head of Sales / GTM leader: Needs to scale outbound without hiring a larger SDR team; current reps lose time on manual research, sequencing, and scheduling instead of selling source.
• SDRs / BDRs at SMBs or mid‑market companies: Spend hours finding contacts, personalizing messages, and following up, leading to inconsistent activity and meeting attainment; want automation to reduce low‑value work source.
• RevOps / Sales Ops managers: Fragmented data and brittle integrations create poor enrichment, messy CRM hygiene, and weak reporting; want cleaner enrichment and direct booking into calendars/CRMs source.
• Growth / demand‑gen marketers (ABM): Struggle to personalize at scale across channels; tests are slow and reply rates low; need automated, personalized, multi‑channel sequences to speed experimentation source.
• Account Executives / closers: Too many meetings are poorly qualified, forcing AEs to do discovery instead of closing; want only pre‑qualified meetings placed on their calendars source.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Founder-led pilots via YC and personal networks plus inbound demos. Offer 4–8 week, low‑cost pilots with performance‑based terms (e.g., pay per qualified meeting) and tight iteration via frequent check‑ins source: demos/sign‑up founder announcement.
• First 50: Convert pilots to a repeatable motion using 3–5 short case studies and an onboarding checklist; run targeted outbound at Head‑of‑Sales/RevOps, host weekly demo webinars, and hire one Growth/Sales & Ops rep to manage SDR‑style outreach. Build lightweight CRM/calendar integrations and templates to speed time‑to‑value source.
• First 100: Add a self‑serve trial with ICP templates and guided onboarding for smaller teams, and launch a referral/partner program with GTM agencies and CRM consultants. Layer targeted content, selective paid LinkedIn for priority segments, and a basic CSM function to protect retention as volume grows.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Core market is sales engagement/outbound automation, estimated at about US$8.99B in 2024, which is the cleanest single figure to anchor on Persistence Market Research. Adjacent categories like data enrichment (~US$2.37B in 2023) and sales force automation (~US$12.8B in 2024) overlap with this core market Grand View Research DataBridge.

Bottom-up calculation:

Assume ~60,000 SMB/mid‑market outbound sales teams globally, averaging 6 user seats on a sales engagement product at ~$120/seat/month; this implies ~US$5.2B annual spend (60k × 6 × $120 × 12), a conservative cross‑check against the ~$9B top‑down estimate.

Assumptions:

• There are ~60k SMB/mid‑market B2B teams running outbound globally.
• Average of 6 sales engagement seats per relevant team.
• Typical effective price of ~$120 per seat per month across comparable tools.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Outreach: A leading sales engagement platform for sequencing, tasking, and pipeline management; a primary incumbent in multi‑channel outbound Outreach.
• Salesloft: Sales engagement and cadencing with analytics and integrations; widely adopted by mid‑market and enterprise teams Salesloft.
• Apollo: Combines a large contact database with sequencing and email outreach, appealing to SMBs and mid‑market teams seeking an all‑in‑one tool Apollo.
• ZoomInfo (SalesOS/Engage): Prospect and company data with engagement workflows (Engage) for outbound and GTM operations; strong data assets plus tooling ZoomInfo.
• Clay: Data enrichment and research automation for personalized outbound; often used to build data‑driven, customized prospecting workflows Clay.