Cyrus is building the AI teammate that sales reps actually wanted – Refresh Miami

LinkedIn, Ali Zolfaghari joked, feels like a battlefield. Important messages vanish. Spam rises to the top. And somehow, sales teams still spend huge chunks of their day hunting for the right thread, document, or CRM field.

That frustration is part of what led Zolfaghari and his co-founder Jake Heenehan to start Cyrus AI, a Miami startup aiming to automate the most tedious parts of the sales process.

The two met while working at an early-stage company called Vendr, which negotiated software purchases on behalf of buyers. Between them, they handled thousands of deals and saw firsthand how long and manual the buying process had become. As procurement became more standardized, sales cycles often stretched out even further.

“So Cyrus was built selfishly for us as buyers,” Zolfaghari told Refresh Miami. The early idea was simple: when a buyer requests documentation or information, Cyrus detects the request and fulfills it immediately on behalf of the seller, cutting down back-and-forth and shrinking deal cycles.

That initial product has since evolved into something broader. Instead of adding another dashboard to a rep’s stack, Cyrus lives inside Slack. Sellers can prep for calls, check deal status, update systems like Salesforce, and respond to customer requests using natural language. When a request comes in, Cyrus can draft the response and ask for approval or even execute it autonomously.

“You wake up in the morning, and Cyrus has run all this work for you,” Heenehan said.

Under the hood, Heenehan said Cyrus uses multiple models, including Anthropic’s Claude (with Opus as a primary model) and Google’s Gemini, plus tooling they built internally. The architecture matters because they are trying to keep quality high as tasks expand. 

“Instead of one agent doing 20 different tasks we have 20 different agents doing one or two tasks,” he said, because “fidelity doesn’t drop off when one agent owns one task.”

There has been plenty of AI built to generate pipeline and automate outreach. What Cyrus is targeting is the messy middle of sales: the updates, the documentation, the internal coordination. 

Heenehan said the goal is not to replace reps, but to multiply them. “We wanted to figure out how to make a human… hit like 400% of their quota because they use Cyrus,” he said, with the system taking on the work they dislike most.

The product just onboarded its first customers and is still early, roughly a third of the way toward the founders’ full vision. Over time, they believe certain parts of sales, like renewals or straightforward deals, could move toward full autonomy, with humans shifting into higher-level roles.

“It’ll be interesting to know what the companies end up doing with that newfound capacity,” Zolfaghari said. Whether they hire less, grow faster, or redeploy talent, Cyrus is betting that the next version of sales won’t revolve around tabs and manual updates, but around agents doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

Pictured above: Cyrus AI co-founders Ali Zolfaghari, left, and Jake Heenehan.

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