With €3.8 million, LEADBAY aims to reinvent sales intelligence through inference models

Sales prospecting tools have built their effectiveness on the same foundation: LinkedIn profiles, job postings, web traffic, technology stacks, marketing campaigns, and social media activity have become the raw materials of modern sales intelligence. Yet this approach leaves out a large part of the real economy.

The premise behind Leadbay is relatively straightforward: millions of SMEs, tradespeople, distributors, and local businesses generate very little data that can be exploited by traditional sales intelligence platforms. In France, sectors such as construction, wholesale trade, hospitality, and retail are still largely composed of small and mid-sized businesses with limited digitalization. In the United States, these same companies account for nearly 40% of GDP.

Modern prospecting tools, however, were designed around a highly structured internet. They excel at analyzing technology companies or businesses with a strong digital footprint, but are far less effective when it comes to understanding local economic ecosystems where data remains fragmented, scattered across administrative registries, industry databases, or simply embedded in the knowledge of sales teams.

Leadbay is attempting to bypass this limitation with proprietary inference models capable of reasoning from weak signals. Whereas a traditional tool looks for explicit indicators, LinkedIn presence, active hiring, technologies in use, the platform seeks to probabilistically reconstruct a company’s activity from highly partial datasets.

The example highlighted by the company illustrates this logic: an independent air-conditioning installer with virtually no digital presence can still be qualified through territorial, sectoral, or operational correlations. The objective is no longer simply to enrich a commercial database, but to rebuild an economic map that remains invisible to traditional SaaS tools.

This approach is gradually bringing sales intelligence closer to a form of automated economic intelligence. Large corporations are no longer merely looking for contact lists, but for a detailed understanding of their local markets, distribution networks, and subcontracting ecosystems.

The startup says it is already working with several major enterprise clients, including Saint-Gobain, L’Oréal, Nespresso, Gerflor USA, Fayat USA, and Deel. According to Leadbay, its clients triple the size of their addressable market and double the number of newly signed customers. The company also claims that 55% of the contracts generated through its platform come from businesses that would not have been identified using conventional tools.

Beyond commercial performance, Leadbay’s technological positioning also reflects a broader evolution within the enterprise AI market. After several years dominated by generative AI tools, part of the ecosystem is now seeking to use AI to reconstruct layers of information absent from the traditional web.

The platform is therefore built around several analytical layers called “LIGHT,” “INSTANT,” and “DEEP,” respectively dedicated to large-scale qualification, real-time processing of high-priority prospects, and in-depth exploration of complex datasets.

This segmentation also reveals a concern that has become central to the AI economy: the trade-off between analytical depth, execution speed, and computing cost. Modern AI architectures are no longer evaluated solely on accuracy, but also on their ability to industrialize complex reasoning at scale.

To accelerate its growth, the French startup has announced a €3.8 million funding round backed by Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Progressive VC, Bright Data Ventures, Inovexus, Roosh Ventures, and Station F, alongside several business angels including Philippe and Alex Bouaziz of Deel and Edouard Mascré of Pennylane.

Founded by Ludovic Granger and Milan Stankovic, a PhD in artificial intelligence and author of more than sixty scientific publications, the company is developing a platform capable of identifying and qualifying businesses that remain largely invisible to traditional prospecting tools.

Leadbay now plans to open an office in San Francisco to accelerate its US expansion and recruit additional engineers and sales profiles. At the same time, the company has announced a research partnership with Sorbonne University to further develop the scientific work underpinning its inference models.