vikaasWe built Vikaas to fix our own pipeline problem. Then we opened it.
Vikaas wasn't built as a startup. It was built as internal infrastructure at Banao Technologies — our parent company, a custom software agency that had hit the referral ceiling. We needed outbound that worked, couldn't justify an SDR team yet, and didn't trust the existing lead-gen agencies. So we built our own. After 350+ Banao clients were originated through it, we opened it to other founders.
Banao had hit the referral ceiling.
For its first eight years, Banao Technologies grew on referrals alone. By late 2023 — like every established B2B services business in India — the referral pipeline saturated. The buyers who built the business were retiring. New buyers moved through LinkedIn, not through warm introductions. Banao needed an outbound layer, and didn't have one.
The options on the table were all wrong:
Hire 3 SDRs
₹40L/year in salaries before tools and management overhead. Six months of ramp. Banao would be paying for an SDR team to figure out a motion that didn't exist yet. The risk-cost ratio didn't work for a bootstrapped agency.
Hire an agency
Cookie-cutter sequences from anonymous SDR profiles. ₹3–5L/month for activity reports. The agencies Banao met couldn't explain how their motion would compound beyond month 1. The economics were upside-down for what they delivered.
Build it ourselves
Banao is a software agency. Building internal tools is what we do for clients every day. So we built it for ourselves — using AI for signal scoring and message drafting, humans for calibration and conversation. It worked. We kept building.
Vikaas originated 350+ Banao clients.
Within 12 months of running internally, Vikaas had originated 350+ qualified buyer conversations for Banao Technologies. The agency's ARR grew 2.6× — entirely bootstrapped, entirely from founder-profile LinkedIn outreach driven by Vikaas. No SDRs hired. No long-term agency contracts signed. The internal tool was doing what every external option had failed to deliver.
By Q3 2025, three things had become clear: the engine worked, the playbook was repeatable, and other bootstrapped + funded founders we knew were facing the exact same problem. So we started letting them in — first the Axlrate founder cohort, then InterviewGod (our sister company), then a handful of growth-stage SaaS teams. By Q2 2026, Vikaas was running pipelines for 80+ external customers. The internal tool had become a product.
For nearly a decade I ran Banao on referrals. Every consulting CEO I respect has done the same — a business built on relationships and word-of-mouth, where outbound felt slightly beneath us. By 2023 that posture was costing us. Our existing customers were brilliant, but they weren't expanding fast enough to drive the referral growth we'd assumed would continue forever.
I tried the agencies. I priced out the SDR pods. Neither worked for how Banao actually operated. Both required us to become a different kind of companyto get the outbound layer working — and that wasn't the trade I wanted to make.
So we built Vikaas. First version was scrappy — AI message drafting from our internal stack, signal scoring on top of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, human operators handling the conversation layer. By month 6 we'd originated 50 new client conversations. By month 18, we'd done 350. The agency doubled in revenue. We never hired the SDR team.
I realized somewhere along the way that we'd built what most B2B founders I know are looking for and can't find. So in 2026 we opened it up. Vikaas now runs outbound for the kinds of companies I would have wanted to hire when I was looking for it five years ago — bootstrapped founders, funded startups hitting Series A growth pressure, established businesses adding their first outbound layer, HR leaders trying to source senior talent without retained-search fees.
We're not the right answer for everyone. We say no to ~25% of the discovery calls we take. But for the teams we work with, the math is unambiguous — and the relationships compound the way the referral pipeline used to.
From 80 customers to a category.
The 12-month thesis is straightforward: AI-native, human-led outreachis its own category — distinct from self-serve tools (Apollo, Outreach), distinct from traditional lead-gen agencies (templated, low-trust), distinct from fully autonomous AI SDR products (11x, Artisan). Three things we're focused on through 2026 and into 2027:
Expand buyer-intent signal coverage
Capability 03 — quieter, more predictive AI-driven signals — rolls out from select engagements to standard inclusion across the customer base. The signal layer is where the engine compounds beyond what any individual SDR pod could replicate.
Deepen the India + GCC footprint
More operators in Bengaluru. A second hub in Dubai. Localized messaging engines for Arabic, Hindi, and English-default GCC senior talent. The two-region focus stays sharp; we won't expand to US/EU until India + GCC is genuinely saturated.
Build Company Brain as a real product
For founders whose positioning isn't ready for outreach yet, we offer Company Brain mentorship today. Through 2026, it becomes a structured product — a 30-day positioning sprint that graduates founders into a managed pipeline cleanly. The two halves of the engagement come together.
Want to be one of the next 500 founders we work with?
Thirty minutes on the discovery call. We'll listen to your situation, tell you honestly whether we're a fit, and — if we are — start a pipeline that compounds like the one we built for ourselves.