AI startup Wayy has raised a $2 million pre-seed funding round to power its platform designed to serve as a virtual sales co-founder for solopreneurs and small businesses.
The round was led by 0 to 1 Ventures and included angel investors including Tunç Yalgin, who previously sold his company to eBay and was an early investor in Wayy co-founder and CEO Leo Popov’s previous startup, TrueCare24. The funding will be used to expand Wayy’s go-to-market strategy and accelerate product development as the company looks to capitalize on growing demand for AI-powered business tools. According to Wayy, 70 companies are already using its platform on a recurring basis.
The AI-powered Miami-based startup aims to automate some of the time-consuming sales and business development tasks that can overwhelm first-time founders. The platform identifies prospective customers, recruits talent, and helps entrepreneurs connect with investors and strategic partners, allowing them to spend more time building their products.
Wayy was born out of lessons Popov [pictured above] learned while building TrueCare24, an on-demand healthcare company that expanded from a local startup into a national operation during the COVID-19 pandemic. That business partnered with major corporations and state governments while helping scale testing and healthcare services across the country. That experience convinced Popov that many founders face two challenges simultaneously: deciding what to build and figuring out how to sell it.
“The number of people starting their own businesses has surged, and a big part of that is driven by layoffs. These are talented, motivated people who have the skills to build something real, but they’re doing it alone, with limited budgets and no co-founder to lean on. That’s exactly who Wayy.ai was built for,” Popov said in a statement. “Everyone deserves a partner in their corner who knows how to sell, works around the clock, and never asks for equity.”
Users access the platform through a web application that operates autonomously in the cloud, eliminating the need to keep a computer running. After analyzing company information and a founder’s LinkedIn profile, the system builds an understanding of the business before identifying qualified prospects, drafting personalized outreach messages, and requesting user approval before making contact.
At the core of the platform is a proprietary lead qualification engine developed by Wayy co-founder and CTO Aleksei Samarin and his team. Rather than relying on simple filters, the system evaluates prospects based on multiple factors, including industry fit, seniority, buying intent, and alignment with a company’s ideal customer profile.
“We built a system that replicates that reasoning process across thousands of profiles simultaneously,” Samarin said. “Each candidate passes through several layers of filtering and scoring before it ever reaches the user. The speed is what changes – the judgment stays the same.”
Wayy also continuously learns from campaign performance. Every three days, the platform analyzes engagement and response rates to refine its targeting and messaging strategy automatically. It also monitors activity across a user’s network, surfacing potential business opportunities when relevant requests or conversations emerge.
The company reports its AI-driven outreach achieves response rates of approximately 3%, above the 1.2% to 2% typically generated through manual cold outreach. Early users are averaging roughly nine new potential clients per month, with businesses serving specialized markets reporting some of the strongest results, Popov said.
Wayy was founded in 2023, and underwent two pivots before launching the product in November 2025, Popov told Refresh Miami. The startup is a remote global team of seven; Popov lives in Miami.
What’s next? Wayy plans to expand beyond AI-powered sales outreach into a broader growth platform that includes referral networks, affiliate marketing, and coordinated multi-channel customer acquisition. With an estimated 30 million solopreneurs in the United States alone, the company believes it is addressing a massive global market as entrepreneurs increasingly turn to AI to help launch and grow their businesses.
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