CEO at Hotbox
Harpriya Bagri
I've grown 3 companies from 0 to millions in ARR by building viral playbooks, with 2 exits. The last one was acquired by Salesforce. As a machine learning engineer, I've built the LinkedIn ranking algorithm, been published in NeurIPS, and built the deep reinforcement learning algorithm used to fine tune the particle beam for Canada's National Particle Accelerator.
Questions & Answers
What sets you apart from others in your industry?
LinkedIn has Sales Navigator. B2B has Clay. Enterprise has Salesforce. But for the businesses that live and grow on social media, none of these tools exist. As distribution shifts from email to algorithms, the infrastructure to monetize that distribution hasn't kept up. Every like, comment, save, and DM is a voluntary behavioral signal, richer than an email open and more personal than a web click. It's the largest untapped dataset of consumer intent that exists today, and no one has ever captured, enriched, or turned it into something a business can act on. Hotbox is the only sales intelligence platform built for social commerce. We enrich every profile, score purchase intent, and build the intelligence layer on top of social engagement. It's Clay for the era of algorithmic distribution, on the richest behavioral dataset that has ever existed.
What problem or opportunity inspired you to start your company, and how has your vision evolved since then?
The opportunity was personal. I was a founding engineer leading growth at a startup later acquired by Salesforce, and my DMs were flooded with enterprise deal flow I couldn't manage. I built a research agent that scraped social profiles and surfaced intent signals. That became Hotbox. Since then, the vision has expanded. Social media is the largest untapped dataset of consumer intent that exists today. A social interaction tells you who they are, what they care about, and where they are in their buying journey. None of it has ever been captured or turned into something a business can act on. Hotbox turns every signal into pipeline, so businesses close more, close faster, and unlock revenue they didn't know they had. It's becoming is the prediction graph: a cross-platform map of consumer intent no business has ever had. It tells you who will be ready to buy next week, next month, and why. That's the infrastructure layer for the algorithmic era of commerce.
Why are you excited about your company/product?
For the first time, AI makes it possible to bring sales intelligence to every business. Salesforce, Clay, and ZoomInfo are extraordinarily powerful, but they've only ever been accessible to large B2B enterprises with dedicated sales teams and six-figure software budgets. The economics never worked for anyone else. AI changes that. And the timing couldn't be better. Businesses today don't start with a website or an email address. They start by creating an Instagram page. From the local plumber to the luxury hotel to the enterprise SaaS company, discovery, intent, and close all happen algorithmically through social. Hotbox is serving the next billion businesses that live and grow on social media. That's what I'm excited about: building the infrastructure layer for a market that's never had one, at the exact moment AI makes it possible to serve them.
