Opine just dropped a $5M seed round led by S3 Ventures, and the whole presales ecosystem felt the tremor. This is what happens when a team that lived the chaos decides they’re done duct taping CRMs, scattered Slack threads, and tribal knowledge just to keep a deal alive. Akash Ganapathi, Charlie Duong, and Austin Kelleher built an AI-native workspace that treats technical sales like the revenue engine it has always been, not the forgotten middle child between product and closing. When former JupiterOne leaders who scaled ARR from 6 figures to 8 and helped push a rocket to a $1B+ valuation decide the status quo is broken, you do not debate them. You watch the market sprint to catch up.
The investors did exactly that. S3 Ventures stepped in after Knoll Ventures made the intro, and the alignment was instant. Knoll doubled down. Atlanta Seed Company joined. Gray Ventures, Propel Ventures, Triangle Tweener Fund, and Socket.dev CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh added fuel. The pre-seed believers like WndrCo, Primordial Ventures, Propel Ventures, and others saw early what everyone else sees now. When a company posts 10x revenue and 10x customer growth across 2025, that is not a blip. That is gravitational pull.
Opine earned it with real outputs, not pitch deck poetry. One customer, Director of Solutions Engineering Mark Rida, said a single search often replaces a 30 min call. Anyone who has lived presales knows that is not convenience. That is time compounding into pipeline velocity. Teams report faster sales cycles, tighter POCs, and zero information leakage between presales and postsales. CRM sync fires automatically. Slack notifications show up without nudging. Meetings summarize themselves. POCs assemble from templates. Kickoff agendas and success plans appear the moment ink dries. Deal context stays intact instead of getting reconstructed like cold cases the morning after a contract closes.
The founders built this because they lived every inefficiency. Akash Ganapathi carried the weight of translating product into value across enterprise labyrinths. Charlie Duong engineered the data backbone behind JupiterOne’s scale and brought that rigor here. Austin Kelleher built systems that survived hypergrowth and refused to let presales work become a patchwork of good intentions. They did not create a tool. They created a workspace where technical sellers can actually think.
This $5M round accelerates deeper AI automation, sharper deal intelligence, and a GTM push that pulls more enterprises into the fold. Raleigh and the broader Triangle gain another company proving the region knows how to scale intelligence, and B2B vendors finally get a platform that mirrors how complex deals unfold. Opine is not just capturing signal. It is giving the market a place to hear itself clearly.
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