Cedar Raises $3.1M for Its AI Sales Platform
Cedar (cedarcopilot.com), a YC W25 startup building an AI-native go-to-market platform for account executives, has raised $3.1M in seed funding. The round includes investors Kulveer Taggar and Mathilde Colin (both YC Visiting Partners), Transpose Platform, exited YC founder Ooshma Garg, Katey Caldwell (Twenty Two Ventures), and Daksh Gupta, founder of Greptile.
The company publicly launched in June 2026 after building the product in close collaboration with sales reps at fast-growing startups. Cedar has been used by AEs at companies like Cursor, Warp, and Listen Labs, as well as Greptile.
Cedar's premise is that AI should help salespeople sell better, not replace them. The platform connects to a team's existing sales data and maps out a customized playbook for each rep, covering everything from pre-meeting research to follow-up content to multi-threading strategies. It then deploys agents that proactively nudge reps to stick to the playbook that works.
The company was founded by Jesse Li, who previously worked at Intuit, and Isabelle Ilyia, who was a software engineer at Figma, Notion, and LinkedIn. Both studied computer science at Georgia Tech. The team built Cedar by observing hundreds of AEs doing their daily work, identifying how much time was lost to context-switching between tabs, copying transcripts, and managing follow-up lists.
"Every time they come to office hours, I struggle to answer their questions. I'm very impressed by their thinking, and Cedar is a fantastic product that the market really needs."
— Gustaf Alströmer, General Partner at Y Combinator
Early results from customers show meaningful improvements in sales velocity. AEs using Cedar respond 2x faster and have cut follow-up times from 14 days to 5, according to the company. Reps can also build custom agents tailored to their own workflows and ICPs, rather than relying on one-size-fits-all automation.
The bet Cedar is making is on what Jesse Li describes as "AI-native design and platforms that humans actually interact with." Rather than building another tool that automates outbound sequences or replaces SDRs entirely, Cedar is focused on the account executive's day-to-day work, the part of sales that still requires judgment, relationship-building, and deal-specific context. The company's goal is to help the fastest-growing GTM teams ramp up new reps faster and spread top-performing playbooks across the organization.