A Chat with Adit Abhyankar, CEO at AI Assistant: Breakthrough

Tell us about Breakthrough

Breakthrough is an AI assistant that helps relationship-driven sales people create authentic, high-quality sales touchpoints effortlessly. Unlike other tools that don’t understand you, or require endless tweaking, Breakthrough continually learns from you and your real customer interactions to tailor B2B storytelling, positioning and sales material, improving the impact of every email, call and pitch.

Breakthrough customers range from startups to Fortune 500 companies in education, consulting, technology and manufacturing.

How did you come up with the idea for the company? 

The idea for the company began with a simple question: Can AI sell? To explore this, we have focused on the essence of selling – the pitch itself. A good pitch requires understanding your own value proposition and differentiation deeply, researching your prospects carefully, and communicating in a way that earns trust. If AI could help sales people do this better, that could transform B2B sales.

Looking at the market, we noticed two key gaps. First, while many AI sales tools existed, almost all focused on automating sales processes, rather than sales communication itself. Second, these tools prioritised efficiency over quality, using superficial research and inexpensive models, with an eye towards scale instead of truly building AI to drive persuasive communication.

Breakthrough is addressing that gap; our platform learns from customer interactions to understand how businesses can communicate their value better, making Breakthrough not just an automation tool, but the best messaging model for the enterprise at a highly granular level. We believe being the ‘source of truth’ for this messaging model will unlock limitless applications for AI-powered sales.

What is your advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

As a serial entrepreneur with multiple successful exits (Breakthrough being my 7th startup) my advice to entrepreneurs would be: Don’t scale prematurely. Most entrepreneurs, pre series A, have not really achieved full PMF (Product Market Fit) or positioning that truly bites in the market.

Many of them don’t get there until well after Series B as they often confuse early adopter interest or POCs with PMF. Getting ahead of yourself in terms of investing in sales and marketing before you have this nailed, can be very dangerous.

What most excites you about Breakthrough?

The most exciting thing is that Breakthrough is in the middle of the AI explosion, unencumbered by legacy.  As a result, we can be very creative, quickly take advantage of the latest technology to build our platform in a way that will truly ‘wow’ our customers. Plus, we get to free-ride the massive investment and progress being made by so many great AI companies for micro-cents, which is really a crazy subsidy and huge wind behind our tail.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

Breakthrough was founded only a little over a year ago but we’ve achieved so much in that time. Over the last year, with just a tiny engineering team, we have evolved from wondering whether we could actually build it, to building a full production-ready product that generally impresses almost everyone we show it to. We have validated our market with more than 600 customer interviews, we have already secured $600,000 in pre-seed funding, and have recently won our first paid Fortune 500 customer.

What can we hope to see from Breakthrough in the future?

In 2025, our focus is on accelerating customer traction and we expect a breakout year. We’re extending our product to integrate with call recording platforms so that it’s continuously learning what resonates with each persona and industry. Breakthrough will allow organisations to approach sales in a highly personalised way – that will help them target better, qualify better, and navigate the entire sales cycle better, instead of relying on a single, monolithic, repetitive message and go to market strategy.