LeadSift (a Foundry company)

At LeadSift our mission is to mine Intelligence from Unstructured Public Web Data to help Organizations better engage their Customers.

For B2B technology companies - at any given time less than 25% of your Total Addressable Market is actively looking to buy your product/services. LeadSift helps you identify and prioritize these accounts and prospects by mining for signals of interest and intent across the Public Web

We have already helped some of the savviest technology companies like: MuleSoft, Vidyard, Looker, InsightSquared, Skyword, VMWare, ShowPad, IBM etc. identify the next best accounts to engage with using Behavioral Intent Data.

CEO / Co-founder

WebActionHero

Lead product and engineering for a SaaS Project Management tool for the Oil & Gas and Construction industry

Head of Technology and Product

GenieKnows.com

This is where it all started. Worked on everything required to build a Web Search Engine:
* Ranking algorithm
                 - A link based ranking scheme for focussed search - WWW 2007 
                    https://dblp.org/rec/conf/www/OBrienADGMZ07.html
* Web Spam detection
                - Combating Spamdexing - Incorporating Heuristics in Link Based Ranking - WAW 2006
                   https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-78808-9_9
* Web Indexing 
* Web Crawling
* Entity recognition

Research Engineer

i have some news!!

we’ve closed a $1.1M pre-seed for Gia  to power the future of consulting

AND we're actively onboarding users into the Gia platform 

Gia is an AI growth partner for consultants that works 24/7 to scale your services business - increasing brand awareness, finding your next client, helping you manage your client deliverables


To all our early customers - this is for you!! From early prototypes to Gia now driving millions in pipeline for consultants globally, you’ve pushed us with feedback , feature requests, and real-world examples; you all are truly our partners! 

Because of builders like you, we believe we can empower 1 million entrepreneurs to stop building someone else's dream, and start scaling their 
own.


Thank you to the investors for your support and conviction in what we are building. Panache Ventures Prashant Matta Patrick Lor OMERS Ventures Brian Kobus Success Venture Partners John Gleeson Ian C. Sreejata Chatterjee Marc Savoie Ian Livingstone Gerry Pond

We are just getting started and this is Chapter 1 of our story … our vision is to change how professional service firms deliver work and grow their business in the AI era
 
This is gonna be one hell of a ride ... Lets gooo 🚀

Tapajyoti (Tukan) Das

Building Gia - growth platform for professional service providers

Co-founder @Gia | Growth platform for modern consultants & agencies

Excited to announce our $1.1M pre-seed funding round!
And what it means 🔽

Consultants are having their “Shopify moment”

Today, we’re officially launching Gia - the first AI-native growth platform built specifically for Consultants, Fractionals & Agencies.

The round was oversubscribed led by Panache Ventures with participation from OMERS Ventures, Success Venture Partners, East Valley Ventures, and a group of incredible angels.

But this is much bigger than a fundraise.

It’s about the shift we’re seeing play out in real time:

💡 Senior leaders are leaving corporate to go independent

💡 The freelance consulting economy is worth $647B — and growing fast

💡 Yet most consultants are running their business with duct-taped tools, Google Sheets, and tech that doesn’t fit.

We didn’t want to build another CRM or AI co-pilot.

We wanted to build the infrastructure small consultants actually need:

- To get the next client
- Keep them longer
- And grow without hiring a massive team

So we spent months shadowing consultants - literally acting as their executive assistants.

Booking their meetings. Writing their content. Managing their pipeline.

Then we built Gia.

⚡ A system of AI agents that helps consultants grow - automatically.

Earlier this year, we quietly soft-launched the MVP.

We hit our 3-month customer target in 4 weeks (50 users).

Today, dozens of firms - including ex-leaders from Google, Deloitte, BCG, and EY - are using Gia to run faster, leaner businesses.

To every consultant, agency & fractional building something of your own:

We see you.

We’re building for You.

And we’re just getting started.

—
Shoutout to Brian Kobus from OMERS Ventures (also an early Shopify and Jobber investor), who said it best:

“What Shopify did for ecomm and Jobber did for home services, 
Gia is building for knowledge entrepreneurs.” 

If this resonates, shoot me a msg.

There are 13 weeks left in 2025! And we are going to use every single one of them...

... to grow Gia AI

Now that we have officially launched Gia, the product feels solid and the roadmap locked in. Bailey Darling and I are going to focus everything on new business.

Our goal : 3X revenue by December 31st 2025

With AI apps ecosystem getting noisier by the hour, no in-house marketer, and big media $$ to burn, the odds are stacked against us.

This is the exact playbook we are going to follow.

✅ Founder Led Sales : We block 30–60 mins every day for 1:1 outreach on LinkedIn. Zero automation. Pure Hustle.

✅ Organic LinkedIn: This is where our audience lives. So we’re going to show up more : through product videos, customer testimonials, behind-the-scenes content, our POV about future of consulting etc. 

✅ Customer Ambassador Program : 1 in 4 demos comes from our customers. We are super grateful for that.  Other than making an insanely good product that provides 10X value, we are making it easier than ever for happy customers to refer us.

✅ Targeted outbound: Having built and sold a company in this space - I know the value of signal based prospecting. Will be experimenting with a hyper focussed email campaign that looks at signals like : agencies hiring for growth roles, consulting firms engaging with competitors or our content, 2nd degree connections etc.  Minimal personalization, focus on timely outreach and crisp value prop.

✅ Eco-system sales: We’re leaning into a few key fractional/agency communities that already trust us. These partnerships. are gold. Will be experimenting with exclusive offers for members of these communities.

We’ll track it all. Learn. Adjust. Repeat. Will share relevant insights and learning here.

If you're building too, we see you. Let’s make the last 13 weeks count!!

Let’s go. 🚀

🤔 Are you a even a real startup if you don't have a podcast? j/k

‼️ Super excited to be launching a new video series called : 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐅𝐢𝐭

A show where we dive deep with founders of professional services firms - consultants, agencies and fractionals, exploring their 0 → 1 journey. 

You’ll hear their “aha” moments:  early struggles, how they got their first customer and tactics that flipped uncertainty into steady demand.

In our first episode we sit down with Joel Kelly founder of Kelford Inc., to unpack his 0→1 leap.

From quitting his Director role at a big agency with a 4-month notice to closing his first contract 4 days into “time off”. Joel talks about that gap that other agencies weren't solving and his counterintuitive approach to standing out in a crowded market.

Would love your thoughts on the first episode!

It’s early days (rookie mistakes and all), but the goal is simple: real stories from service founders on how they found traction.

Tell me what you’d love to hear more about - I’m building this for entrepreneurs in the services industry.

Full video details in comments below 👇

What if I told you the #2-rated hotel in LA is a tacky 1950’s motel with no elevator…

You know what their secret is?

A red phone labeled “Popsicle Hotline.” 

Pick it up. Say your flavor. A staff member, sometimes wearing white gloves, will appear with a silver tray of popsicles - for FREE.

That’s it. No app. No tech. No loyalty program. No AI

Reminder to founders building a new company:

You don’t need a big budget or a bold move to stand out.
You just need to care, and be creative in the small stuff.

What’s your version of the popsicle hotline?

Gia is going to be the most boring AI company you’ve ever seen.

No flashy demos.
No magical assistants flying across your screen.
No “did you see that?” moments.

We’ve made a conscious choice to go uncool - and build agents that solve the boring problems that actually move the needle for busy consultants!


Here are 4 very boring tasks Gia agents do every day for our customers:

* Calendar → CRM 
 Scan who you’re meeting each week, enrich profiles, check for ICP fit, and sync them to your newsletter or CRM.

* Signal tracking across active deals:
 Watch your pipeline and surface signals - like team growth, competitor engagement, or content interaction -  and automatically update the deal.

* Smart relationship mapping for new deals:
 When you log a new deal, Gia looks backward and sideways - scanning your calendar, network and past calls and automatically updates them with relevant contacts and past call summaries.

* Meeting prep, without the scramble:
 Every morning, Gia prepares a pre-read for who you're meeting and their company, using publicly available data - so you walk in informed without lifting a finger.

It’s the kind that quietly works in the background - making you faster, sharper, and more consistent.

And in our view (and our customers) - that’s the kind that wins. 

Curious to hear:
What’s the most boring (but high-leverage) task you would delegate to an agent?

The #1 investor concern while raising for Gia was
👇 
 

Fractionals/Boutique consulting firms  are a TOUGH market to build for and sell into!

“Small businesses can’t pay much.”
 “Acquiring them as customer is expensive.”
 “Churn will be brutal.”

All fair points.

However ... 300+ conversations with consultants later, we saw some non-obvious signal no one else was acting on. That’s what we’re betting the next 10 years on. [Read Article]

Let me know what you think ?

"Why are you building Gia for consultants, fractionals, and boutique agencies?" - Every investor conversation I have recently had, circles back to thi

Open article: Consulting 3.0 - Professional Services is being rebuilt from the ground up by Tapajyoti (Tukan) Das • 2 min read

Consulting 3.0 - Professional Services is being rebuilt from the ground up

UPDATE on our Product Hunt Launch (+metrics breakdown below)

Last week we launched the Gia - Social Content Grader on ProductHunt. A free tool to show how your social content stacks up against your industry peers. 

METRICS: 
* Product Hunt Rank : 20
  -> 23 Upvotes, 29 comments, 60 new followers on Product Hunt
* Number of new email address captured: 64 
* Post Impressions on LinkedIn : 4,500

PROMOTION:

Other than our team sharing on LinkedIn and a 2 friends reposting (thanks Sakshi Pratap and Vikram Maram), we got a “ProductHunt influencer” (seemed legit) with 18,000+ followers post on their social (LinkedIn, Discord, Whatsapp). 

Here's how that went:

* Cost: $50
* Likes on his post about our launch: 340
* Comments on his post : 60
* New Emails Captured: 0
* ProductHunt upvotes: 1 (not 100% sure)

‼️ Lesson Learnt: You get what you pay for ‼️ 

So we obviously did not go VIRAL ... BUT something super interesting happened.

One minor feature of this tool was to compare your content to the industry average and then make specific recommendations on improving that.

... and PEOPLE LOVED THAT part!

We started seeing dozens of people publicly and privately share their score and telling us they loved seeing how they rank against industry benchmarks and our recommendations to improve it!

Guess what - We just crowdsourced our next feature idea!!! 

Gia customers - we will be rolling this functionality out natively in the platform shortly … stay tuned. You are gonna LOVE your new content coach ;)

TLDR; Didn’t go viral. $50 influencer flop. Discovered a killer feature by accident. Win?

I asked Joel Kelly what is one piece of advice he'd give an entrepreneur starting their services business 

See below 👇 

-> Full episode of the Service Market Fit in comments

Taplio

Tapajyoti (Tukan) Das's Linkedin Analytics

's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Taplio

.css-1jgreyo{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39,43,72,1) 0%, rgba(33,47,183,1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Tapajyoti (Tukan) Das's Linkedin Analytics

's Best Posts .css-qqfgvy{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);}(last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Tapajyoti (Tukan) Das's Linkedin Analytics

's Best Posts (last 30 days)