Introduction
On Episode 5 of Bits and Atoms, Elias Can sits down with Artem Chinakov, Co-Founder and CEO of Sudden, an AI-powered sales training and assessment platform. The conversation explores how Sudden evolved from automating high-volume recruitment into building high-fidelity AI simulations that help sales teams practice under pressure. Artem describes Sudden as a “boxing gym for salespeople,” where teams train against realistic, stress-inducing client simulations to sharpen their skills before stepping into real revenue-driving conversations. The episode also dives into the broader AI-in-sales landscape, Sudden’s philosophy of improving human-to-human conversations rather than replacing them, and Artem’s candid lessons from fundraising.
Interview
Elias Can: Hello and welcome to Bits and Atoms, the Grishin Robotics founder series. I'm your host, Elias Can, and today I've got Artem Chinakov, Co-Founder and CEO of Sudden, joining me. To get started, Artem, would you mind sharing a quick intro about you and Sudden?
Artem Chinakov: I grew up in Siberia and then built a bit of a career in consultancy and tech, and now we are building Sudden. Metaphorically, I like to think of it as a boxing gym for salespeople…we create the simulations of clients so that sales teams can practice and improve their skills and do better with the real leads.
Elias Can: Amazing, let's jump into some questions.
Elias Can: To get us started, what originally motivated you to become a founder? What's your origin story?
Artem Chinakov: My first entrepreneurial experience was pretty early. Back when I was getting my bachelor's degree I lacked some cash to take my girlfriend on a date, so I started looking for opportunities to earn a bit more money. I didn’t want to do a generic job but ideally use what I had learned in university so far. My first project was preparing business plans as a service, but then I moved to consultancy and did various other things. Funnily enough, the first real job I worked on as an employee was doing audits, and it turned out to be the opposite of what I love because in auditing you only deal with the past. You want to check that the past is correctly reflected in the financials, and regardless of how wonderfully you have done your job, the world does not change. Then I landed as a GM at a tech business and I decided to move out of Russia. I’ve learned that for me to continue to make an impact on the world that entrepreneurship is the best opportunity out there.
Elias Can: Very cool, and I love the initial story that you were motivated for some extra money for a date. I think it's a good motivator.
Artem Chinakov: We've all been there.
Elias Can: You brought up auditing and the focus on the past, and that leads into my next question which would be landing on AI coaching. How did you initially come across this opportunity? Why did you want to build a business in this space?
Artem Chinakov: It came out of some client work when we launched a project that focused on a different problem initially. So, what we are focused on now is the result of a pivot…a friend of mine approached me with a suggestion to automate high-volume recruitment. He’s an operations guy and has been leading high-volume recruitment for large companies and saw that the business function is pretty basic and there are a lot of problems associated with it which can be eliminated. We initially did it for one company and did it quite well, we scaled their hiring capacity 5x and today we are still helping them with 100% of their recruitment for sales. After we got close with the sales leaders and the learning + development team of the client we learned that staffing is not even half of the business, what you’re sort of attempting is to maximize the revenue you get out of the payroll you’ve associated with the sales function. We started thinking about that together with our clients and we learned that if we just replicate the processes that are done by humans currently we are not helping to use AI to the full extent. If you are actually looking to build a productive sales payroll you’d love to learn a bit more about the skill set of the team you’re building and ideally you would like to staff it with people who are more prone to doing the specific type of sales your business needs. Also ideally you would see how skill sets vary from team member to team member and equip them with a way to enhance certain skills.
I think of it as a boxing gym because sports are a good analogy. In sports, 95% of the time you practice and only 5% of the time you’re in a real game. Sales is arguably one of the most important parts of a business, that’s where the revenue comes from, but 95% of the time was on real leads and companies were wasting them in order for their teams to learn.
Elias Can: It’s an interesting insight that the staffing piece was a challenge, but actually getting them to be effective salespeople post hiring was an even bigger challenge. I think you touched on another piece there too with the cultural perspective and making sure they’re the right kind of personality fit with the team and the product they’re selling as well.
Elias Can: How do you see Sudden differentiating from other coaching products on the market, maybe other staffing products as well since you're touching a bit of both sides? How are you positioning Sudden today?
Artem Chinakov: So we are betting on the depth of the customers we replicate. We are focusing on making sure that whenever a user is speaking to a simulation of a client, the conversations and situations are hard to game and they are stressful. They pump your adrenaline and therefore you’re not just remembering what you’ve been told in a safe environment, but you train under pressure. If you have ever played any sports, you know in order to grow your skill you need to hit above your current level…it should feel difficult. That already separates us from a few products that are out there, I haven’t seen anybody that goes as deep as we do and therefore the sort of hardness and usefulness of the training that we provide feels like a different level.
For example, a few companies we are currently in discussions with are from the pharmaceutical industry. Pharma companies have reps in the field speaking to the clinicians, doctors, and different decision makers around medicine purchasing. There is a ton of context around those discussions because in every country there is a legal way to treat specific conditions which doctors have to stick to and this is something they account for when they listen to the propositions from pharma reps. On top of that, there are specific situations without procurement and the budget may be abandoned or not. This is especially significant if you are speaking, not to a doctor, but to a decision maker who makes the procurement decision for one drug or another. You need to account for the metrics and measures they need to hit legally because of the budget and other reasons. So all of that is in the game with real conversations. If you say “pretend you’re an oncologist and I need to talk to you” you will get a very shallow training experience. I would say we are going deep so that the exercises are provoking stress and therefore they are better in building sales muscle.
Elias Can: Sounds like depth makes the big difference versus something that's more shallow and generalist, you need that depth to really drive better learning.
Elias Can: Would you say that depth is what customers are most excited about when they’re using Sudden? Are there other features or key value drivers that they’ve mentioned to your team?
Artem Chinakov: Yeah, there are few. When we figure out what the customer or client situation is and what kind of customer should be useful to the users, we present them with a simulation of that. Usually everybody is impressed, “wow it feels so real.” The simulation is really smart in answering questions or reacting to propositions. Meeting your client simulation for the first time and feeling how similar it is to the real life customer is something everybody is usually impressed with.
Since we are still at an early-stage of building our business, there are two other areas we may decide to focus on. One is working with existing teams and the other is working with the potential candidates for the roles on the sales team. In the first case, you may go really deep in terms of context because the employees know the product, business, and industry already. In the second case, the candidates are less knowledgeable upfront and there you are rather looking for specific types of sales skill set versus knowledge of the specific industry, products, etc. In the second case you’re trying to help a business spot who is a fantastic candidate. For example, if your business is relying on cross-selling as the core source of margin, you need to see who is a great cross-seller; they may establish wonderful rapport with a client and may demonstrate active listening. They can figure out what the problem on the customer side is and provide what you have as a solution to that problem, that is core to making cross-selling work. So there we create assessments which are available to all the applicants immediately after they apply, they are tuned to spot exactly the type of skill that helps the business of our client. Usually four hours after they see the application, the employer sees how well you are doing with the cross-sell and if you are a wonderful cross-sell specialist, they will know they need to hunt you. You are a gem on the market. If they don’t pick you, some other company will. The speed with which these insights are available will be one of the key differentiators of what we are building. We chose the name Sudden because it feels like suddenly you see the gems among the candidates.
Elias Can: That's a great tie-in on the name! For candidates these days, it seems like they’re getting lost in a sea of applications because everyone can use AI to quickly apply to so many different jobs. I’m sure on the employer side too it’s challenging to find that diamond-in-the-rough when you’re combing through a bigger and bigger stack of resumes.
Artem Chinakov: What I also love about our idea is that we are making the world a better place in a specific way. If you are looking around for AI startups dealing with sales, you may find a lot that try to automate the sales job. But usually those conversions are quite low and you are fighting low conversion with high volume of automated calls. This means you generate a lot of calls which potential customers do not like, and as a consequence do not result in a sale. What we do is help every conversation that real humans have with other real humans be more fruitful. In some ways we are going against the market, but I love that we are making conversations more meaningful, less numerous, and more productive.
Elias Can: Switching gears to one last question, how are you seeing the fundraising landscape? What’s been your fundraising strategy so far? Any tips or tricks or things you’ve found that work really well?
Artem Chinakov: We are still in the process of fundraising, so it’s a bit too early to tell what exactly worked fine and what has not. That said, some things clearly worked badly and these are learning experiences from mistakes. For us, cold outreach proved to be absolutely inefficient. Even though you may have thousands of emails of investors and funds, for us literally the conversion was three calls out of 7,500 leads and that’s something that doesn’t help you close a round. Since then we’ve refocused onto warm introductions and I was surprised to learn how many good connections I have and who may be one degree of separation away. Also, if you find a way to meet with other founders who have just raised, they are usually quite open to sharing their experience and getting to know you. That can also secure a few more warm leads. I haven’t completed that path yet, but I’m standing on the shoulders of giants as they say, and I’m building on the success of a few friends of mine where fundraising worked quite nicely for them and I hope it will for us too.
Elias Can: Finding those second or third degree connections through mutuals can usually help open a lot more doors. Like you said, the cold outreach is very spray-and-pray, you have no control of that at the end of the day whereas at least with warm intros you can steer it how you’d like to.
Artem Chinakov: On that note, if funds are interested in the broad domain you are in, like B2B software, investors are usually open to speak. Other founders as well, securing a round is a wonderful achievement and you like sharing the experience. You feel nice telling other people about it. So that is sort of the card I’m playing here, a bit of flattery but it is sincere. I know the struggle, but I also know how I expect I will be feeling if I succeed.
Elias Can: Yeah, a little flattery can go a long way. I personally believe in and try to follow the reciprocity principle; if you’re nice to someone they’ll tend to be nice back to you. Sure, there’s some people here or there that’ll break it, but for the most part reciprocity tends to work pretty well.
Elias Can: Artem, thank you again for joining me on Bits and Atoms. It was great to have you today, I'll let you get back to building and fundraising!
Artem Chinakov: You're welcome and happy to be a part of it!
Sudden is an AI-powered sales training platform built for the field, where most sales happen in pharma, agriculture, and other high-expertise industries. Reps train on mobile with personal AI coaches against voice-simulated clients grounded in the real constraints of their domain, without burning real leads. The result: more meaningful customer conversations, stronger relationships, and better business outcomes.
Grishin Robotics is a Silicon Valley-based VC firm focused on investing in early-stage companies in broader consumer categories. Grishin Robotics has invested in category-defining companies such as Ring (acquired by Amazon), Spin (acquired by Ford), Zipline, Starship, and many others.
