Revolutionising Sales Tech: How Revium is Taking on the Giants

Revium’s Co-founders: Paget McCormack (Head of Product), Stephanie Walsh (Chief Operating Officer), and Patrick Rhatigan (Chief Exec)

Starting a company takes a bit of a shove. You might have a great idea, but most normal people have responsibilities that dissuade them from the insanity of building a startup. If you’re going to give it a go, you need something to convince you it’s worth the gamble, and that catalyst varies from founder to founder.

Patrick Rhatigan is the Founder and CEO of Revium, an AI-first platform that vastly accelerates the speed and efficiency of salespeople. When he walked away from his wildly successful agency business to start afresh, the catalyst was the frustration he felt with multiple underperforming “market-leading” sales tools.

“I spotted the personalisation problem in sales eight years ago, but none of the big companies cared. They were fat bears sitting by the waterfall, plucking salmon out of the river using the power of their brand name alone. We’re currently in talks with one of the largest and most successful CRMs on the market, they thought they’d never have a problem selling their software. They just missed their quota for the second consecutive year.”

What is the ‘personalisation problem’, you might ask? (I did). “A personalised message increases prospect engagement by 40%, but it takes between eighteen and twenty-four minutes to prepare a personalised email. That’s not scalable, so you have to use AI appropriately to do that work for you. The industry giants have just heard the wake-up call that sales is broken, but Revium is going to fix it.”

Rhatigan spent the last twelve years building 10G in New York City, an outbound sales agency that worked with over 250 companies to generate $1.2 billion in qualified pipeline. He left this eight-figure business to found Revium nearly two years ago.

The startup is led by four people: Rhatigan, COO Stephanie Walsh, Paget McCormack, who leads product development, and Conor Wade, their CTO. Walsh, who worked in senior communications roles for multinationals in the US, says she was willing to accept what Rhatigan terms “mates rates” on the salary front to jump ship into the startup world. What about the other two?

“I’ve known Paget for 20 years and we always wanted to work together, but I could never afford him,” explains Rhatigan.

When I ask how he finally convinced McCormack to join, Rhatigan leans back in the chair and laughs. “One time, we were talking about work at a wedding and Paget made the mistake of saying he was interested in a career change. I thought okay, he’s had a few drinks, let’s strike while the iron is hot, and I managed to persuade him to come aboard.”

Revium recently recruited Conor Wade as their new CTO. He has a strong track record in this realm. Wade co-founded Chronogolf, a golf club operations startup that was acquired for $20 million by Lightspeed. This wasn’t his first dalliance with sportstech - Wade previously developed platforms for Olympic teams and created a safety solution for equestrian sports with EquiRatings.

The team has been busy building. B2B sales platforms do not normally set the soul aflame. But compared to the vast majority of pre-seed startups, which have products that are held together by rusty paperclips and bits of Blu Tack, Revium’s platform is, I must admit, a thing of beauty.

Their design is clean and pleasing and it’s very clear where they will save you time: they can personalise messages to prospects in seconds, track how engaged those prospects are, and even have a nifty ‘Power Dialer” feature that allows you to ring five prospects at once and gives you a completely tailored call script for each prospect that answers! If it had been around in 1992, Glengarry Glen Ross would have been a much shorter film.

“When Paddy built 10G, they developed a gold standard for outbound sales,” explains Paget McCormack. “All of that knowledge is now baked into Revium - it’s built by salespeople, for salespeople. Most of our competitors deal with one small slice of that process, or how two parts interact together, whereas Revium is focused on the entire sales motion.”

Patrick Rhatigan, Revium CEO, pitching to a 400-strong Demo Day audience

It might sound intimidating to solve the whole sales process at once. McCormack, though, sees it as a silver lining: “Looking at the whole picture allows us to examine things that aren’t a big enough problem to solve on their own. Maybe it’s a small inefficiency, but it amounts to an hour a week for a sales rep. We’re looking at those pain points and solving them one by one with new features.”

‘Sales technology powered by AI’ is a saturated space, to the degree that I sighed three times just typing it. Rhatigan admits that he initially lost some sleep over how Revium would stand out from the growing crowd of competitors claiming to leverage AI, but these worries have been outweighed by the positives.

“Five years ago, no one understood AI, it was something from sci-fi movies. Then all of a sudden, it wasn’t. As an AI-first business, the rise of ChatGPT and other models has been great for us on the awareness front.”

“Now, we’re seeing that the wheels are coming off the AI hype train, because all of these ChatGPT wrapper companies you’re referencing are running on the same tech, and all behaving the same way. They’re stuck in second gear, whereas we can go as fast as we want, because we can run on any number of models. The architecture of our platform is incomparable.”

A point of pride for Revium’s team is that their AI tech predates ChatGPT, with several patents pending. According to Rhatigan, “that piece is incredibly valuable and makes us highly defensible. Also, because it’s a tool built by salespeople rather than engineers, it’s really straightforward. Even a really inexperienced user can leverage it like a high performer.”

Walsh agrees: “Our competitors’ products are difficult to use, whereas ours is highly intuitive. When we give you an account, you’re up and running and using it effectively in an hour or two.”

Most of the discussion around AI is about what it can kill. Eliminating administrative tasks like data reorganisation, deleting certain career paths (I’m looking at you, call centres), and of course, annihilating the entire human race, if you’re a bit of a pessimist. To Rhatigan, AI means the death of wasted time. 

“People need to wake up and realise that AI is not designed to just replace people. It's designed to accelerate their careers. Previously, you had to do two or three years trudging through shitty work as a BDR, cold calling and cold emailing people. With Revium, those people are now getting promoted and moving up the ladder in a few months.”

Revium co-founders during investor Office Hours with Conor O’Sullivan from Atlantic Bridge

Many familiar faces in the Irish startup world have made a permanent jump across the Atlantic. The Collison brothers and Eoghan McCabe of Intercom are some of the most prominent names in Silicon Valley. Finn Murphy leapt from the Irish VC world to start his own early-stage venture fund, Nebular, in NYC. Just weeks ago, Patrick Finlay of Solidroad, another NDRC Accelerator alum, set up shop in San Francisco.

I’m curious to ask the Revium team, having spent over a decade building deep ties and a strong network in New York City, why they have chosen to build a startup in Dublin. Rhatigan thinks for a moment:

“I’m a terrible student. I did terribly in school, then terribly in college. But when I left Ireland, a lot of people were coming out with undergrad or a masters with great results having spent a lot of time, effort, and money getting them. They walked into graduate roles that paid them a pittance. They couldn’t move out and couldn't do anything they wanted to do. It was the opposite of the American dream. It was the Irish dream, which was more like a nightmare, really.”

“Myself and Steph have family and friends here. When Covid hit the States, we came back for a couple of months, stayed longer and longer, and ended up deciding that we'd move back full time. Building a business that creates jobs in Ireland has always been a huge ambition of mine, and it just all came together.”

Has anything surprised Rhatigan about Ireland since opening a new chapter with Revium? “If you’re asking what really shocked me, I would say it’s when you see how overwhelmingly helpful people are in helping to make introductions and offer advice,” says Rhatigan. “Irish people are so self-deprecating. We’ve talked to C-level executives at giant public companies or people that have sold their business for hundreds of millions that just walk into the room and say: “Hey, how can I help?”

The team have built a platform that may one day make an appetising acquisition for one of those well-fed bears lounging by the waterfall. They started selling ninety days ago and have closed well over €200k in revenue in three months. Rhatigan sees a business that will be valued at over a billion dollars within the next decade: “We're very passionate about the problem that we're solving. ”

My eyes flick over to McCormack and Walsh. Do they believe as much as Rhatigan does?

“When I was joining the company, I was really nervous because I’d always had a normal job,” says Stephanie Walsh. “I’m not a massive risk taker. But when Paddy was trying to persuade me, I sat in on some of the customer calls and heard what people were saying about Revium, and I saw how incredible it was. After that, I was happy to give up my pension and job security. Because it didn’t feel like a risk. It felt like a sure thing.”