meet agent frank

E-⁠resident Frank Sondors is CEO and co-founder of Estonian startup Salesforge, which blends humans and AI agents to maximize sales pipeline coverage

It could be said that Estonian e-resident Frank Sondors is now both human and machine. As a person, Frank is a living, breathing, father of two who now calls Vilnius, Lithuania, home after spending a decade in the UK and Ireland. He's also the CEO and co-founder of an Estonian startup called Salesforge, which offers a platform that enables companies to reach out to potential clients with the help of AI agents, one of whom happens to be named Agent Frank.

This is where it gets a little complicated.

"I decided to model the AI agent after me, to ultimately replace me," says Frank. His Google Meet background is the deck of a spaceship, so that it looks like he's calling me live from space.

One imagines that if people ever colonize the moon, they might be using Agent Frank there too.

Agent Frank is considered a face or product of Salesforge. As an AI Agent, Agent Frank can pursue new leads through an automatic prospecting feature, book meetings on your behalf, and learn on the go, just like a new sales hire. But Agent Frank isn't just a persona Frank gave to this AI Agent. Salesforge's Agent Frank also makes use of Frank's domain expertise in sales.

"Those people who know me in sales would know my performance in sales," says Frank (the human one, not the AI Agent). "We are mimicking my performance in sales over software." In the future, he says, Salesforge will introduce other AI Agents with other names to assist clients.

"They will all be called after great sales people in the world," Frank says.

The boy from Ventspils

Frank is a Latvian who hails from Ventspils, a picturesque port city of about 33,000 people on the Baltic Sea. He at one time dreamed of a future in politics, and studied international relations at the University of Southampton in the UK, from which he received his bachelor's degree, and then international security at the University of Bristol, where he got his master's. But after spending time in Brussels working at the European Commission, he pivoted toward business. Of this decision, he recalls frankly:

Naturally, he headed to Ireland to work at Google. He spent more than two years in Dublin working as a marketing consultant for Google Marketing Solutions. "It was like day and night," Frank says of the experience, noting that everything in the company was run efficiently and online. In a way, it was a harbinger of what was to come, as well as his future as an e-⁠resident.

According to Frank's LinkedIn profile, he has about 36 work experiences under his belt, but some of the major stops along the way after Google were at SimilarLab, a London-based company that specializes in digital measurement and market intelligence, where he served as enterprise customer success manager; Intent, a UK data science company for online businesses, where he was a client partnerships and strategy manager; and Whatagraph, a Lithuanian firm which offers a platform for monitoring and reporting on marketing performance.

At Whatagraph, Frank served as senior vice president of sales and later of client partnerships.

A born again e-⁠resident

Frank's move to Lithuania was for personal reasons -- he's married to a Lithuanian -- but he decided to make his life more thoroughly Baltic when he elected to embark on his own venture, which he dubbed Salesforge. To set up his own company, he decided to incorporate in Estonia via its e-⁠Residency program. Frank had previously applied for e-⁠Residency already when he lived in the UK in 2017 and had a card, but his idea hadn't panned out and the card expired.

With Salesforge the program beckoned again. He applied and received e-⁠Residency once more.

The company was officially set up in July 2023. It has inarguably been a success. At its founding, he had just a handful of founders. In that time, the company has grown to 34 people.

There were a few reasons why Frank decided to make this company an Estonian one. One was the language factor. "I'm not Lithuanian and I don't speak Lithuanian, so I need to do everything in English and everything needs to be online," he says. "That's where e-Residency shines."

He also likes the way that services are streamlined in Estonia:

Frank also liked Estonia's tax policies, which he considers to be among the most startup friendly globally. "The system is built in a way that gives you the greatest chance to succeed," he says.

All together, these "operational aspects," as he calls them, encouraged Frank to choose Estonia. The other contenders for incorporation were Delaware in the US as well as the UK.

Latvia and Lithuania were never under consideration for linguistic and bureaucratic reasons.

Leaner and meaner

The premise of Salesforge is to use AI to reduce personnel needs, as well as expenses, while augmenting sales. It is specifically designed for startups that are trying to break into the market, but not only, as larger, established companies can use Salesforge and its various applications to trim its sales teams down and improve their operations.

"Companies typically look at building their sales pipelines by hiring a lot of people," says Frank. "They think that more people equals more sales, but this is a broken concept. It's a bad idea."

The software platforms that exist to help sales teams also fall short, as they are built on the premise of adding to headcount. Frank has a different view:

What Salesforge has created is a suite of forges, or applications, that can be stitched together. Frank likens them to different legos. Salesforge is "the mothership product" and also the company's name. There is Infraforge, a private email infrastructure that allows users to customize their needs using multiple IPs and other features; Mailforge, which provides its users a distributed email sending infrastructure; and then Warmforge, for enhanced email delivery.

Agent Frank, Frank's Agent AI alter ego, can manage all of these different forges for customers.

"Think about it like Microsoft's suite of apps," says Frank. "There's Excel, PowerPoint. It's the same concept and the different products do different things." There are more forges planned.

According to Frank, Salesforge intends to launch two more forges in 2025 and close a Series A of about $10 million in the second half of the year. The two forges will focus on providing data, meaning leads for companies to prospect into, as well as on creating videos that are unique to every single prospect in any language.

"We are a company that aggressively builds products, because each product leads to more revenue, and at a faster pace as well," he says. AI, he adds, has played a key role for the firm.

"With AI, you can do more with less and that's what AI does," says Frank. "From finance to engineering to sales, AI plays a critical role, and there will be more advancements this year."

As such, Frank's AI Agent alter ego Agent Frank might not be so futuristic after all, although it does make some clients do a double take now and then. "Prospects and customers are always wondering whether they're really speaking to me or not," says Frank.

Growing recognition and awards

In 2024, Salesforge was recognized as one of the top startups in the Baltics by Latitude59, TechChill, and Startup World Cup. And just a week ago, Salesforge placed second in the category Newcomer of the Year at the 2024 Estonian Startup Awards. This award was based on the fact that in 2024, Salesforge grew from just three co-founders to a team of 30. Customer count also grew from 50 to nearly 2,000; they built four new products, which grew the company to $3M ARR, equivalent to 41X growth. The company's overall revenue has increased close to 100X YoY, despite only raising $500,000 so far.