Nooks is nestling into Seattle.
The San Francisco-based startup, which builds AI software for sales teams, is expanding its engineering footprint in Seattle — growing from zero to six engineers recently and hiring for more platform and product engineering roles.
The company plans to open a Seattle office and has been working out of investor Tola Capital’s Seattle space while it ramps up, CTO and co-founder Nikhil Cheerla told GeekWire.
Cheerla said the company’s initial Seattle hires were intentional, aimed at tapping a “pocket of talent” — engineers with experience building scalable systems who want to join a fast-growing startup and experiment with the next wave of AI-powered software.
Nooks’ Seattle move lands amid a broader conversation in the region about talent drift — from founders relocating to San Francisco to executives weighing their next steps as Washington debates new tax proposals. In that context, Nooks is making the opposite bet: that Seattle’s depth of engineering talent, especially from large tech companies, makes it a durable hub for building applied AI.
Other San Francisco companies, from software startup Binti to larger AI players including OpenAI and xAI, have also recently expanded in the Seattle area.
Cheerla and his co-founders at Nooks initially made their startup leap in 2020 with a virtual classroom tool during COVID. They later pivoted into a virtual collaboration product — and discovered the pain (and craft) of selling while trying to land customers themselves.
Nooks is now focused on building AI-driven productivity software for sales teams. Its products aim to reduce the busywork around outbound sales: researching accounts, writing emails, handling dials/voicemails, summarizing calls, and recommending next steps — while keeping humans in the driver’s seat for judgment and relationship-building.
Nooks competes in a crowded market for sales software, which includes incumbents like Seattle-based companies Outreach and Highspot (which just announced a merger with Seismic). Cheerla said Nooks differentiates by bridging both data and intelligence with execution. He said this creates a feedback loop: by having the work happen in the same workspace, Nooks can learn from what reps do and refine the system over time.
This week, Nooks is rolling out what it calls the Agent Workspace — a system where sales reps and AI agents collaborate in one place for tasks like prospecting, sequencing, dialing and LinkedIn follow-ups. Nooks says the system can learn a team’s best behaviors and apply those learnings at scale.
Nooks raised a $43 million Series B round in October 2024. Since then, the company says revenue has grown 6X. The company employs about 200 people, up from 90 a year ago. Its customers include HubSpot, Rippling, ZoomInfo, Toast, Postman, Vanta, and others.
Tola Capital managing director Sheila Gulati said the company stands out for pushing AI directly into revenue workflows.
“Nooks is the company evolving the sales experience through AI,” Gulati said. She added: “I’m excited to see Nooks expand into Seattle and deepen its impact across our ecosystem.”
Nooks and Tola are also hosting a Seattle event Feb. 26 focused on domain-specific AI agents deployed in production, featuring speakers including Cheerla, along with Chinmay Barve, VP of engineering at Nooks, Arm’s Sharbani Roy, and Pulumi’s Joe Duffy.
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