Amid SaaSpocalypse Fears, This Startup Wants to Improve Salesforce With RevOps

Software solutions such as Salesforce and SAP are deeply embedded in enterprise revenue teams. However, often, they are under-utilised and under-optimised. 

Beneath dashboards and pipelines lies a quieter problem: misconfigured routing logic, manual workarounds, invisible revenue leakage, and overburdened admins.

As Arushi Gandhi, Co-founder and CEO of Ressl AI, tells AIM, “They don't really know what's the best way to set up Salesforce for themselves, or where the bottlenecks are, or where people are still spending a lot of manual time, or what is causing revenue leakages to happen, so they're not really getting the most out of the system.”

This gap between ownership and optimisation is what Y Combinator-backed Ressl AI is looking to solve.

Choosing the “Unsexy” Category

When Gandhi and co-founder Abhishek Eswaran were exploring ideas, they mapped the future of enterprise AI into three broad buckets—rebuilding CRM/ERP systems from scratch; building agents that sit on top of them; and building agents that configure, audit, and optimise them.

The first two were already crowded. “But this third category felt… just as important… and not very competitive,” she explains.

Instead of trying to replace Salesforce, they focused on making it work better. Initially, they weren’t even sure the models were capable enough. Over time, that changed dramatically.

“In this one year of building, we felt like models have compounded enough that you can actually go ahead and not need to hire an admin anymore. You can enable, just like an ops person, to do everything that an admin or a developer would do,” Gandhi recalls.

From Code Generation to Intelligence

Ressl’s early goals were to use AI to convert requirements into Salesforce configuration code. But working with customers revealed a deeper opportunity.

“The bigger unlock that we've realised by working with customers comes from figuring out those requirements themselves,” the co-founder remarks.

Instead of simply generating Apex, XML, or metadata, Ressl began building agents that audit entire Salesforce instances—mapping processes, identifying inefficiencies, and suggesting structural improvements.

The product connects to a company’s sandbox, pulls metadata via APIs, constructs a knowledge graph, and routes user queries through it. Over time, customers move from ticket-resolution workflows to full-execution workflows.

The impact has been immediate.

A sales operations lead at a B2B tech startup, who wants to remain anonymous on account of compliance, shares, “In the past two months of working with Ressl, we’ve cleared our backlog and conducted a technical audit of our Salesforce org rather quickly. Previously, we’d have waited until next quarter to add bandwidth to the Salesforce team to address these tasks.”

An enterprise apps lead at a $2-billion database company described a different win. “We used to spend a few hours every day answering queries every day that we receive in Slack, which required a ton of context switching. Ressl enables us to resolve queries a lot faster and with deeper context,” they noted.

Why US First, and What’s Holding India Back

Despite being founded by Indian entrepreneurs, Ressl is currently US-focused.

The reason is structural. Gandhi explains, “At the end of the day, it comes down to how much penetration Salesforce itself has. Salesforce is a new, emerging technology in India. So, it's super unlikely that we can go into an India-focused GTM and get customers.”

There’s also an economics problem. In India, human operational costs are low enough that AI must deliver dramatic efficiency gains to justify adoption.

Arushi notes that unless AI is meaningfully cheaper or significantly more productive than humans, enterprises won’t rush to switch.

Sreejith Madhavan, COO of consulting firm Zerone, adds context. “Indian IT firms are AI-enabled at the tooling level, but AI is still largely a feature and not a decision-making layer that cuts across sales, finance, and delivery systems,” he notes.

That creates opportunity, but not yet at a scale the Americans are tapping into.

RevOps and the Services Industry Reset

Revenue operations has evolved from reporting support to cross-functional coordination.

According to Grand View Research, the global revenue operations market was estimated at $4.39 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $16.98 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 16.6%. The growth is driven by data-driven decision-making and improved collaboration across sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

In services companies, revenue is far from being integrated. Sales owns the pipeline. Delivery owns execution. Finance owns billing. Ops maintains systems. No single function owns end-to-end revenue integrity.

“RevOps fills the core gap in services firms where no single function owns end-to-end revenue reality, leading to inflated pipelines, margin leakage, and delayed billing despite ‘healthy’ dashboards,” Madhavan adds.

AI-driven RevOps introduces a neutral intelligence layer that connects CRM, ERP, and operational data, flagging risks before they surface in quarterly numbers.

Ressl’s sales motion reflects this shift. Bottom-up adoption through admins rarely works.

Gandhi says, “AI agents in general are a very top-down kind of push… But if we directly go to the CIO and get the CIO excited about the proposition… it's a much better sell.”

Will Salesforce Build This?

Salesforce is already embedding AI agents into its stack. But Gandhi sees a clear boundary. “I think Salesforce will absolutely create some kind of built-in agent… What they aren't doing is the functional consulting.”

Salesforce can provide infrastructure. It cannot deeply customise process optimisation for every company’s specific go-to-market motion.

And contrary to predictions that AI will kill ERP/CRM platforms, Ressl’s founders believe the opposite. AI may actually increase stickiness.

Large enterprises are unlikely to rebuild their own CRMs. Maintenance, logic changes, routing rules, and interdependencies—these evolve weekly in scaling companies. Outsourcing that complexity remains rational.

The internal role of Salesforce admin is also evolving. Gandhi frames it along three axes. “One would be the speed of delivery. Second will be attention to detail. Third would be the skillset itself.”

Instead of siloed technical roles, the future admin blends functional understanding with execution capability—supported by AI agents that handle repetitive or deeply technical tasks.

As Eswaran suggests, the collapse of functional and technical boundaries—already visible in product and engineering—will likely play out in RevOps as well.

What Comes Next

Ressl raised $500,000 from Y Combinator earlier this year, and plans to raise again at Demo Day. The company says customer traction is moving steadily upmarket, from Series A startups to larger enterprise accounts.

Cross-platform expansion—into tools like Snowflake and DealHub—is on the roadmap, but only once customer patterns solidify.

The broader thesis remains consistent: ERP and CRM systems aren’t going away. They’re becoming more complex, and enterprises need an intelligence layer to keep up.

Ressl AI isn’t rebuilding Salesforce. It’s building the operational brain that sits above it. In an enterprise world obsessed with predictable revenue and lean teams, that may prove to be the more durable bet.