# Inventive AI

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/inventive-ai/ · added 2026-11-08 · updated 2026-11-08

**In short.** Inventive AI (AI agents that draft answers to RFPs and security questionnaires, United States): 20 customer case studies on its own site, November 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 3 co-founders in 2023; Latka counts 5 (YC) or 11 (LinkedIn) people in June 2024; the YC page lists 15 (read November 2026). Launched 2023; still running.

AI agents that draft answers to RFPs and security questionnaires · United States · AI-native · started small, grew after funding · still running · group: Sales and lead follow-up

- Outcome: 20 customer case studies on its own site, November 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure)
- Launch: 2023; months from launch to the outcome: 46
- Team: 3 co-founders in 2023; Latka counts 5 (YC) or 11 (LinkedIn) people in June 2024; the YC page lists 15 (read November 2026)
- Outside funding: Y Combinator Summer 2023; US$4M seed round led by Sierra Ventures, announced August 2024
- Main factor: Founders who had met the RFP problem in their own company
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 1, capital needed 2
- Tags: AI-native, Small team, Funded, Running, B2B, Sales software

Links:

- Visit inventive.ai: https://www.inventive.ai/

**The product.** A web platform for sales, proposal and security teams. It collects a company's past answers, documents and connected drives into one knowledge hub, and AI agents then draft answers to RFPs, security questionnaires and due-diligence questionnaires from that content, with citations. Customers pay a fixed platform fee plus a price for each RFP or questionnaire; the pricing page says plans start from US$830 a month billed annually.

**Why it worked.** The CEO had met the pain of RFPs at his earlier startup, Viewics, which Roche bought, and the two other co-founders came from Google's LaMDA language-model team and from Stanford AI research. They started in 2023, went through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch and, according to the August 2024 press release, raised a US$4 million seed round to grow the team.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Inventive AI sells software that answers RFPs, requests for proposal: long documents in which a buyer asks several suppliers the same questions before choosing one. It also answers security questionnaires, lists of hundreds of questions about data protection that large customers send before they buy software. The product keeps a company's approved answers and documents in one knowledge hub, a searchable store of the company's own content, and AI agents draft each answer from it with a citation, so a sales or proposal team edits a draft instead of writing from nothing.

Dhiren Bhatia, Gaurav Nemade and Vishakh Hegde founded the company in 2023, according to its press release and its Y Combinator page, and were in YC's Summer 2023 batch. In June 2024 Latka, a database of software companies, counted 5 people from YC data or 11 from LinkedIn. In August 2024 the company announced a US$4 million seed round led by Sierra Ventures; its YC page listed 15 people when read in November 2026.

No revenue figure was found. Latka shows only its own estimate, on a page that says the company has not published its revenue, and an estimate of that kind is not a revenue figure; so this story is grade E, and its headline is the 20 customer case studies on the company's site. The price list, the named customers and the team sizes come from the company's own pages and press release. The page also shows four failed startups that sold knowledge or sales tools to companies.

## Pricing

Inventive AI prices in November 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform plan, all features | from 830 |  | fixed platform fee plus a price per RFP or questionnaire; unlimited users; billed annually |
| Enterprise or custom | custom quote |  | for large teams; tailored pricing and dedicated support |

There is one plan with all features. The customer pays a fixed platform fee for setup, onboarding and access, plus a price for each RFP or security questionnaire it works on; users are unlimited, and the page says unused RFPs roll over to the next month and into the next year. The page gives only a starting price: "starting from $830/month/billed annually" and "Plans start at $10K/year" (830 times 12 is 9,960). Exact prices come from a custom quote after a 15-minute call. Prices are in US dollars.

## How much revenue does Inventive AI make? The numbers, graded

A YC Summer 2023 company with a seed round, published starting prices and named customers; no revenue figure was found

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customers, November 2026 (headline) | 20 case studies on the company's site (November 2026); named customers include Spectro Cloud and Salt Edge (August 2024) and AssetWorks, HiBob and Rad AI (pricing page) | C | Customer quotes in the press release and on the pricing page. The case-study page lists stories about MaxVal, Solifi, Harte Hanks and others, and says "20 Case studies 70 + Testimonial clips". These are the company's own pages. | [9, 3, 5] |
| Company founded | 2023 | C | Press release of 28 August 2024: "Founded in 2023". The YC page and Latka also give 2023, and the first site, getinventive.ai, ends with "Inventive AI Inc. 2023" in September 2023. The inventive.ai domain showed a for-sale page in December 2020 and still in March 2024, so it was bought later and was not an earlier business of the founders. | [3, 2, 1, 14, 13] |
| First website | getinventive.ai, an early-access page by 11 September 2023 | C | Internet Archive copy: "Get Early Access", answers to RFPs, security reviews, DDQs and RFIs "with the power of LLMs", and the three founders as CEO, CPO and CTO. The company's site was on www.inventive.ai by 23 May 2024. | [14, 13] |
| Founders | Dhiren Bhatia (CEO), Vishakh Hegde (CTO), Gaurav Nemade | C | YC page and the company's Our Story page. Bhatia founded Viewics, bought by Roche; Nemade was the first product manager on Google's LaMDA; Hegde led machine learning at Ambient AI and studied at Stanford. | [2, 7] |
| Team size | 3 co-founders in 2023; 5 or 11 in June 2024; 15 in November 2026 | C | Founders from the press release and YC page. Latka lists two June 2024 readings: 5 from Y Combinator and 11 from LinkedIn. The YC page read on 8 November 2026 says team size 15. | [3, 1, 2] |
| Y Combinator batch | Summer 2023 (S23) | C | YC company page, status Active, location San Francisco. The press release gives Mountain View, California. | [2, 3] |
| Seed round, announced 28 August 2024 | US$4 million | C | Company press release on ACCESSWIRE, reprinted by European Business Magazine; Pulse2 reported it on 6 September 2024. Led by Sierra Ventures with Y Combinator, SOMA Capital and General Catalyst. A funding round is not revenue. | [3, 4, 8] |
| Starting price, November 2026 | from US$830 a month billed annually; "Plans start at $10K/year" | C | Pricing page. Fixed platform fee plus pay per RFP and security questionnaire, unlimited users, custom quote. | [5] |
| AI model providers | Azure AI, OpenAI and Cohere listed as sub-processors; zero-data-retention agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic | C | Privacy policy (sub-processor list) and security page. Customer data is stored in Amazon Web Services. | [11, 10] |
| YC Launch post | 13 September 2024, 52 votes when read in November 2026 | C | "AI-First RFP and Questionnaire Response Platform". It says drafts come 10 times faster; that is the company's claim. | [12] |
| Time from founding to the November 2026 case-study count | 46 months at most | calc | Calculated: from January 2023, the earliest month of the founding year (the month is not published), to November 2026. From September 2023, when the early-access site was live, it is 38 months. | [3, 9, 14] |

How to read this table: grade D is a third-party estimate with no second source; Latka's revenue estimate is not a revenue figure. Grade C is a statement by the company on its own pages, its YC pages or its press release. A "calc" value (grade X) was computed on this page.

## When did Inventive AI launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From an early-access page in September 2023 to a funded team of 15 selling RFP software by November 2026. Each entry carries its grade.

- **December 2020** (grade C [13]): The Internet Archive's copy of inventive.ai shows a page that offers the domain for sale.
- **2023** (grade C [2, 3]): Dhiren Bhatia, Gaurav Nemade and Vishakh Hegde found Inventive AI and join Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch.
- **September 2023** (grade C [14]): The first site, getinventive.ai, offers early access: AI-drafted answers with a confidence score and references, and the three founders as CEO, CPO and CTO.
- **March to May 2024** (grade C [13]): On 28 March 2024 inventive.ai still shows a domain-for-sale page; by 23 May 2024 the company's site is on www.inventive.ai.
- **June 2024** (grade D [1]): Latka, a database of software companies, records 5 (YC) or 11 (LinkedIn) people. Its revenue number for this month is its own estimate, on a page that says the company has not published its revenue.
- **28 August 2024** (grade C [3, 4]): Press release: a US$4 million seed round led by Sierra Ventures. Customers at Spectro Cloud and Salt Edge are quoted.
- **13 September 2024** (grade C [12]): Launch post on YC's launch page: AI agents for RFPs and sales questionnaires, and an AI content manager that flags stale answers.
- **November 2026** (grade C [2, 5, 9]): The YC page lists 15 people. The pricing page starts at US$830 a month billed annually, and the case-study page shows 20 customer stories.

## Why did Inventive AI work?

### Founders who had met the problem

The press release says the CEO met the pain of RFPs at his previous startup, Viewics, which Roche bought. The two other founders brought language-model and machine-learning work from Google Brain, Stanford and Ambient AI. The lead investor, quoted in the same release, named this mix of AI skill and experience in selling to enterprises as the reason for the round.

### Answers only from the customer's own content

The product drafts each answer from the customer's approved content, gives the citation, and flags a question it cannot answer instead of guessing. An AI content manager marks old or conflicting answers. The site puts this first, under the heading "Hallucination-free answers".

### A price per RFP, not per seat

Customers pay a platform fee plus a price for each RFP or questionnaire, with unlimited users. Proposal work needs answers from many people across a company, so a per-seat price would keep those people out; a per-document price lets them all join.

### Security for security questionnaires

A tool that answers security questionnaires must pass one itself. The company states SOC 2, a zero-data-retention agreement with its model providers, and that customer data is not used to train general models.

## How it was built

These details come from the company's own pages, its YC pages and its press release. They are grade C.

- The first site, in September 2023, said it drafted answers "with the power of LLMs" and gave a confidence score and the sources for each answer.
- A knowledge hub fills itself from past RFPs, documents, Google Drive, SharePoint, Salesforce, Seismic, and questions and answers exported from older tools or spreadsheets.
- Drafts cite the approved content they come from; the site says missing information is flagged, never guessed.
- An AI content manager flags stale and conflicting content in the hub.
- The privacy policy lists Azure AI, OpenAI and Cohere among its sub-processors; the security page says it has zero-data-retention agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Customer data is encrypted at rest in Amazon Web Services; the pricing page says "SSO Ready" for single sign-on.
- Newer features: Portal Answers for RFPs inside the Coupa, Ariba and Jaggaer procurement portals, and an MCP connection to clients such as Claude, Cursor and ChatGPT. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is a standard way for AI assistants to call outside tools.

Sources: [14, 3, 2, 7, 12, 11, 10, 5]

## Who tried this before Inventive AI, and why did they fail?

Four companies in our database of failed startups sold knowledge or sales tools to companies. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Niles (2017 to 2020; funding US$2.8M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A Slack bot that answers employees' questions from the company's knowledge.
- Why it died: Slack added similar features itself, and Guru and Confluence widened their products. Niles depended on Slack and could not move.
- Record: 

### Toplyne (2021 to 2024; funding US$15M; cause: No Market Need)

- Promise: AI that tells sales teams which free users will pay.
- Why it died: Sales teams shrank in the layoffs of 2022 and later, and buyers asked for a return the tool could not clearly prove.
- Record: 

### Slik (2017 to 2020; funding US$1.2M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Sales intelligence that finds and ranks leads for sales teams.
- Why it died: LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo had more data, and Slik could not keep its data fresh, so customers left.
- Record: 

### Glider (2012 to 2015; funding US$1.5M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: One hub for drafting, negotiating and tracking contracts.
- Why it died: DocuSign and Adobe Sign offered more complete suites, and Glider's prices kept small businesses away.
- Record: 

## What changed

Niles and Slik sold a layer of knowledge or data on top of tools that larger companies owned, and those companies added the same features. Toplyne sold a sales tool whose value buyers could not measure when budgets were cut. Glider sold a document hub against suites that already had the customers.

Inventive AI sells a finished draft of a document that has a deadline and a deal behind it, so a customer can count the RFPs and the hours. A customer quoted on the company's media page said the older tools, Loopio, Responsive and Qvidian, "still felt like Q&A pairs" even with AI; Inventive drafts whole answers with language models. The same risk as Niles remains: the model providers and the large sales platforms can add RFP drafting themselves.

## Can one person copy Inventive AI now?

**Verdict: Not as one person today.**

The product is sold to enterprises with SOC 2, single sign-on and a custom quote after a call, and the company raised a seed round and grew to 15 people. What one person can copy is the approach: pick a long, repeated document job with a deadline, draft only from the customer's own approved content, and price per document.

1. Choose a document that companies answer again and again under a deadline (RFPs, security questionnaires, grant forms, tenders).
2. Build the store of approved answers first; draft from it with citations and flag what is missing.
3. Price per document so that every expert in the customer's company can join.
4. Pass the security checks your own buyers will send you.

**What is still open.** Narrow kinds of bids where the general RFP tools give no special help, such as the federal construction and government consulting proposals that appear among the company's own case studies.

## What could go wrong for Inventive AI?

- **What is not verified.** No revenue figure was found: the seed-round press release, the YC pages and the company's own pages read for this page give none, and no payment-processor profile was found. Latka estimated about US$1.7 million a year for June 2024, marked "EST", on a page that says "Inventive AI has not published its revenue"; that is Latka's own estimate, not a revenue figure, so this page does not use it. The headline count of 20 case studies comes from the company's own customer-stories page. Latka's two headcounts for the same month (5 from YC, 11 from LinkedIn) also disagree. A reader could look for a revenue figure in a later funding announcement, a founder interview, or a payment-processor-verified profile.
- **Competition.** The company's own customer quotes and case studies name older RFP tools that customers replaced: Loopio, Responsive and Qvidian, and general ChatGPT accounts. On this site the closest stories are DeltaGen AI, which answers buyers' technical questions live during sales calls, and yggy, which builds a knowledge graph from company documents; neither sells RFP answers.
- **Dependence on model providers.** The privacy policy lists Azure AI, OpenAI and Cohere as sub-processors, and the security page names agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic. A change in their prices or terms would reach the product's costs, and these providers could offer document drafting to the same buyers.
- **Trust signals and claims.** The media page states "32 G2 badges", "Highest Performer for 5 Consecutive Quarters", a Gartner Peer Insights score of 4.9 of 5 and "#2 ranked vendor in category" without links to those listings in the text read. Several pricing-page testimonials give a name with no company, one is signed "Nick K", and the YC launch post quotes customers without names. "Hallucination-free answers" and "up to 50% higher win rates" are the company's marketing claims.
- **The team grew.** Three founders started it in 2023; the YC page lists 15 people in November 2026, after a seed round. The story is shown as a small start that grew, not as a one-person business.

## Sources

1. Latka: Inventive AI revenue 2024, estimate — https://getlatka.com/companies/inventive.ai (grade D). Read in full on 8 November 2026. A third-party estimate, labelled as such, and two headcount readings for June 2024.
2. Y Combinator company page: Inventive AI — https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/inventive-ai (grade C). Read the company data in the page on 8 November 2026: founders, titles, year founded, batch, team size, location and description.
3. European Business Magazine (EBM Mediawire), 28 August 2024: Inventive AI Secures $4M in Funding to Transform RFP Workflows (ACCESSWIRE press release) — https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/inventive-ai-secures-4m-in-funding-to-transform-rfp-workflows/ (grade C). Read in full. The company's press release as sent through ACCESSWIRE: the seed round, the founders, the founding year and customer quotes.
4. Pulse2, 6 September 2024: Inventive AI: RFP Optimization Platform Raises $4 Million (Seed) — https://pulse2.com/inventive-ai-rfp-optimization-platform-raises-4-million-seed/ (grade C). Read in full. A news report of the same press release.
5. Inventive AI pricing page — https://www.inventive.ai/inventive-ai-pricing (grade C). Read in full on 8 November 2026. Source for the starting price, the pricing model and the testimonials.
6. Inventive AI home page — https://www.inventive.ai/ (grade C). Read in full on 8 November 2026. Source for the product claims (faster responses, win rates).
7. Inventive AI: Our Story — https://www.inventive.ai/about (grade C). Read in full on 8 November 2026. Source for the founders' backgrounds and the product menu (Portal Answers, MCP, cited answers).
8. Inventive AI: Media (Inventive AI in the Spotlight) — https://www.inventive.ai/media (grade C). Read in full on 8 November 2026. Source for the seed round summary, the investors, the badges and the competitor quote.
9. Inventive AI: Customer stories — https://www.inventive.ai/customer-stories (grade C). Read the list of case studies on 8 November 2026. Source for the named customers and the count of case studies.
10. Inventive AI: Security — https://www.inventive.ai/security (grade C). Read in full on 8 November 2026. Source for the zero-data-retention agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic and for hosting on Amazon Web Services.
11. Inventive AI: Privacy policy — https://www.inventive.ai/privacy (grade C). Read the section on sub-processors and on Google Workspace data on 8 November 2026.
12. YC Launches, 13 September 2024: Inventive.ai - AI-First RFP and Questionnaire Response Platform — https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Lqv-inventive-ai-ai-first-rfp-and-questionnaire-response-platform (grade C). Read in full from the page data. The founders' launch post: problem, features and unnamed customer quotes.
13. Internet Archive: copies of inventive.ai of 2 December 2020, 28 March 2024 and 23 May 2024 — https://web.archive.org/web/20201202164240/http://www.inventive.ai/ (grade C). Read the capture lists (CDX) for inventive.ai and www.inventive.ai and three copies: December 2020 ("inventive.ai is for sale"), 28 March 2024 (a Dan.com domain-for-sale page) and 23 May 2024 (the company's own site on www.inventive.ai).
14. Internet Archive: getinventive.ai, 11 September 2023 — https://web.archive.org/web/20230911131534/https://getinventive.ai/ (grade C). Read in full. The company's first site: early-access page, product description, the three founders and "Inventive AI Inc. 2023". The capture list for getinventive.ai starts on 3 August 2023.
15. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Inventive AI? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Inventive AI).