Our Story
We believe the best deal starts with a trusted introduction.
David Chang spent four years running revenue at a B2B infrastructure startup in Palo Alto. In 2024, his sales team hit a wall: reply rates below 2%, sequences burning through good prospects. One afternoon, a junior SDR accidentally discovered that a board advisor was a close college friend of the VP of Engineering at their top target — and closed the deal in 11 days via a single warm intro. The path was already there. Nobody had thought to look. David founded Via AI in 2025 to make that search automatic.
Why we're building this
B2B buyers are not ignoring your cold emails because your subject line is wrong. They're ignoring them because their inboxes are saturated with cold emails that all look the same. Spam filters catch more each quarter, and the ones that make it through still get three seconds of attention before they're archived. In most industries, B2B cold email reply rates sit below 2%.
The answer is not a better template. It's a different path entirely. A warm introduction — where a mutual connection vouches for the ask — produces reply rates that are roughly 15–20 times higher. Every experienced enterprise rep knows this. The gap is that finding who can make the intro requires manual Slack messages, spreadsheet archaeology, and a lot of guessing at who knows whom.
Via AI automates the path search. It reads the contact metadata your team already has — CRM records, email header patterns, LinkedIn connections — and builds a relationship graph showing every path between your org and any target account. Not contacts you've never met. Introductions you already have access to, that nobody thought to surface.
We are not building another sales engagement tool. We don't schedule sequences or compose cold outreach. Via AI does one thing: finds the shortest warm intro path to the person you're trying to reach.
The Team
Small, focused, and building fast
David Chang
Founder & CEO
Maya Okonkwo
Head of Product
Alex Novak
Head of Engineering
What we believe
Privacy-first
Relationship data is sensitive. We access only what you explicitly authorize, store only what's needed, and never share your graph with other customers. Consent is not optional — it's the model.
Relationship honesty
We show real connections, not manufactured ones. An intro path only appears in Via AI if it reflects an actual relationship. We don't pad the graph with weak signals or scraped contacts to inflate the numbers.
Ruthless simplicity
The intro path is the product. We don't want Via AI to be a platform — we want it to be a fast, clear tool that sales teams actually use. Every feature we ship either helps you find a path or helps you send the intro.