The AI hype machine loves copilots. Shiny assistants that whisper insights into dashboards while humans keep slogging through the actual work. That’s not transformation, that’s Clippy with a neural net. InstaLILY AI, founded in February 2023 by Amit Shah and Sumantro Das, looked at that landscape and decided to skip the sidecar. Their model is different. Real teammates, not copilots. They call them InstaWorkers, domain-trained AI agents that don’t just suggest the next move, they execute full workflows inside the legacy systems that keep B2B operations running.
Headquartered in NYC with a distributed U.S. team, InstaLILY has gone from concept to 65 employees in just over 2 years. The target market is as brutal as it is overlooked: distribution-heavy industries like construction supply, industrial parts, insurance, and healthcare services. These are sectors where complexity and volume overwhelm existing tools, where automation has historically failed. InstaWorkers were designed to plug into Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and other enterprise software without ripping anything out, running workflows that once devoured human hours with accuracy and scale.
And the early numbers hit. A $10B construction supply distributor deployed AI sales support across 1,500 managers. A global OEM uses InstaWorkers to power field techs through fault analysis and parts prediction. A private equity–backed healthcare and insurance provider cut manual claims review time by 70%. These are not proof-of-concepts, they are production deployments. The kind that attract investors who can smell execution over promises.
InstaLILY just closed a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners, with Perceptive Ventures and Marvin Ventures joining in. Crissy Costa Behrens of Insight Partners captured it best: hiring a domain-trained AI teammate is an idea that’s both intuitive and built to scale. The distinction is clear, horizontal AI toys with productivity; vertical AI like InstaLILY owns outcomes.
Amit Shah’s leadership track record at McKinsey, 1-800 Flowers, and Blue Apron set the tone. Sumantro Das brings a decade of sales and partnerships expertise plus a seat on the Google Chrome Advisory Board. They’re flanked by Karim Motani driving finance and business development, Rachel Krah building culture after stints at Meta and Google, and Sasha Newman-Oktan steering product strategy from Columbia. Engineering horsepower comes from Iris Cheng, Dhiraj Khanal, and Logan Ge, leaders who cut their teeth at CERN, Mayo Clinic, and Chicago physics labs before turning their focus to applied AI.
This round will scale the catalog of InstaWorkers, deepen integrations into the backbone software of industry, and push into multimodal territory, voice, video, and even human-agent-robot collaboration. It’s a simple proposition dressed in serious tech: enterprises don’t need copilots, they need AI that clocks in and works the shifts people are done covering. With $25M on the table, InstaLILY is betting that the future of work isn’t about assistance, it’s about execution.
