Banking
In late 2023, David Walker and Zander Pease set aside six months to figure out what kind of company they wanted to build. “We gave ourselves six months. Not to build, not to fundraise, but to research,” Walker wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this year. Five days a week, the pair met in venture capital offices across New York, brainstorming and interviewing what Walker described as “smart people” about emerging opportunities. They explored ideas ranging from logistics to healthcare before narrowing in on sales technology.
“AI and GTM kept coming up,” Walker wrote. By December 2023, they had landed on the concept for Spara, an AI platform designed to modernize inbound lead conversion. Less than two years later, the company just announced $15 million in seed funding led by Radical Ventures and Inspired Capital, with participation from XYZ Ventures, FJ Labs, Remarkable Ventures, and angels from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The financing will support team expansion, product development, and investment in multimodal capabilities.
Building for a Changing Sales Model
Spara develops custom AI agents for voice, chat, and email that engage prospects, qualify them, and book meetings in real time. Each client’s model is trained on its own sales process, qualification criteria, and brand voice, and integrates with scheduling and customer relationship systems.
