AICO is a leading-edge service specialising in lead generation and appointment setting, powered by proprietary AI technology. The clients it serves operate in one of the most demanding, relationship-driven verticals in enterprise B2B: mergers and acquisitions.
Investment bankers, business brokers, and private equity firms rely on AICO to reach the people who are hardest to find through any other channel.
CEOs, founders, and business owners actively or prospectively considering selling their company.
These are not prospects who respond to generic outreach. They have to be identified through precise signal, approached at the right moment, and given a compelling reason to take a call.
In the last year alone, AICO generated over 1,000 booked appointments for its clients. Not positive replies. Not open rates. Qualified calls with business owners and decision-makers at companies being evaluated for acquisition or investment. Smartlead has been the infrastructure layer underneath all of it for the past two years.
Who Is Behind Valhalla and AICO?
Garik Tate is an AI Futurist, international keynote speaker, investor, and expert in AI and systems intelligence. He is the CEO and co-founder of Valhalla.team, the AI-native venture studio that built AICO as one of its core services.
Valhalla does not build traditional agencies running templates and hoping for replies.
It builds systems-first operations powered by proprietary AI technology, treating commercial outcomes as engineered results rather than activities.
The infrastructure AICO runs today reflects twelve years of cold email experience across multiple ventures, including a publishing company, a software development firm, and a virtual assistant agency. Every one of those businesses was built on the back of cold outreach.
Cold email has been the consistent thread across all of it. During COVID, the team experimented with warm networking and relationship-led approaches. They came back to cold email. The reason was direct.
"Cold email is just like the turn on the tap method. The fact that you just cannot really control how many sales calls you take and how many you convert with just cold email, it is really hard to beat."
How AICO Built on Smartlead?
AICO switched to Smartlead from Lemlist when the team needed a scale path that Lemlist could not provide.
The initial switch had an ironic origin. Older Smartlead content still circulating at the time suggested LinkedIn functionality that had already been deprecated. The team joined expecting an all-in-one platform.
By the time they discovered the LinkedIn feature was gone, the email infrastructure was already proving itself. LinkedIn had become secondary to the core operation. Smartlead stayed.
Two years later, AICO has not moved. The reason is not inertia. It is the API.
"The reason why we have stayed, which I think is a little more compelling, is that Smartlead's API is very, very strong. It is not a bug-free platform. There are still some bugs that pop through. But you guys take such good care of it, always being on the cutting edge, and , just being very API-driven. That has worked really well for our automations and our own ways of doing things."
For a team with its own software development capability, API quality is not a secondary consideration. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.
The Market AICO Serves
AICO operates almost exclusively in the M&A vertical.
Investment bankers, business brokers, and private equity firms need to reach business owners who are not advertising their openness to a transaction. They have to be found through outbound, approached with specificity, and given a reason to engage.
That makes this one of the hardest cold email contexts in enterprise B2B. The message cannot be generic. The targeting has to be built on real signal. And the conversion metric that matters is not a reply or an open.
"We do not measure ourselves based on positive responses. It is actually on the booked calls. Last year we got over a thousand appointments set for our clients, all with business owners primarily looking to sell their company, all with CEOs, owners, founders."
That is the standard AICO holds itself to. Everything before the booked call is infrastructure cost.
Key Challenges AICO Solved With Smartlead
Building a Proprietary Analytics Layer on Top of Send Data
AICO does not rely on Smartlead's native reporting to understand what is working.
The team exports every outbound email as a structured record via Smartlead's API and loads it into their own database.
Custom queries run across mailbox performance, campaign performance, and copy performance independently, at whatever granularity the team needs.
Understanding cold email deliverability at that level of granularity is what separates a high-performing M&A outreach programme from one that produces volume without qualified pipeline.
"We download all of our send records. Every single email that we send out from Smartlead, we take all that and we put it into a database to run our own queries off of. So we see which mailboxes are doing the best, which campaigns are doing the best, which email copies are doing the best. We get all that data together."
Prioritising M&A Leads at Scale Across a High-Volume Reply Database
When outbound runs at the volume AICO operates, the reply database becomes a management challenge as much as a data problem.
In the M&A context, a business owner who replies to a cold email is at peak interest at that moment. Every hour that passes without a qualified response reduces the probability of a booked call.
AICO built its own internal lead prioritisation dashboard entirely on top of Smartlead's Reply Database API.
Inbox managers work from a custom interface that ranks and surfaces leads by priority rather than working directly inside Smartlead's UI. The system exists because Smartlead exposes a reply database API reliable enough to build production tooling on.
"We use the Reply Database API really heavily to power our own dashboard so that our inbox managers can rank and prioritise leads really, really effectively."
Automating Bounce and Reply Handling in Real Time
At high send volumes in a vertical like M&A, manual bounce and reply processing is both operationally expensive and deliverability dangerous. Every unprocessed bounce is a signal risk to email providers. Every delayed reply follow-up is a warm conversation cooling off.
AICO relies on Smartlead's webhook infrastructure to handle both automatically. Every bounce and every reply triggers a webhook that feeds directly into AICO's internal systems the moment it fires.
"Every time an email bounces or replies, it automatically ends up in our system so that we can take that data right away. Webhooks, reply database, send records. Those are the three functionalities that have worked out really, really well for us."
Scaling Infrastructure Without Proportional Overhead
Before Smartlead, growing a cold email operation meant manually configuring mailboxes, building campaigns by hand, and managing send schedules individually. The operational cost of scaling was proportional to the volume added. Smartlead changed that relationship entirely.
"So much before was really manual. Having to set up campaigns, set up mailboxes ourselves, and then manually sending emails, it was a pain. Smartlead makes it really easy to just scale to the moon pretty effortlessly. The ease of scale is probably the number one difference compared to our previous systems."
The pricing shift from contacts to sends removed the last friction point. The full AICO database sits inside the platform without penalty, and the team can scale to new client volumes without treating growth as an operational project.
Campaign Results: 1,000+ Booked Appointments in One Year
AICO does not measure itself on reply rates or lead volume. It measures on booked appointments only.
In the last year, AICO set over 1,000 of those appointments for M&A clients. All through cold email, all running on Smartlead.
The targeting strategy that produces those results has evolved over two years on the platform.
Early campaigns relied on AI-generated intro lines summarising a prospect's business. Lightweight personalisation that performed well initially. Across the board however the signal has weakened as it became widespread.
"We are getting a lot more clever with how we set up the opening lines. More about activity like they posted on LinkedIn, has their company posted anything, have they hired anybody recently. We are focusing a lot more on that kind of material for the intro lines rather than just the bog standard, I saw you do XYZ and it is amazing."
Data sourcing comes primarily from Prospeo, Apollo, and ListKit for intent data, with some direct streaming from LinkedIn.
The team is currently testing follower scraping from specific LinkedIn brand pages using Leads Forge as an additional signal layer. The direction across all of it is consistent: sharper signal, more behavioural, less generic.
How Smartlead Solved AICO's Challenges
An API Built for Teams That Want to Build On It
The depth of AICO's API usage is unusual even among technically sophisticated agencies.
Custom send record exports feeding a proprietary analytics database. A custom reply prioritisation dashboard built on the Reply Database API. Automated webhook-driven processing for bounces and replies. API-driven mailbox provisioning via SmartSenders currently in development.
The entire infrastructure layer underneath AICO's client delivery model is built on Smartlead's API surface.
"SmartDelivery, SmartSenders, and SmartInfra are all things that Smartlead either pioneered or was very close to follow in that cold email space. So I kind of just know that whatever is the tools out there being used on the cutting edge, Smartlead will end up with as well."
Webhook Infrastructure That Production Systems Can Depend On
Garik notes that earlier versions of Smartlead's webhook functionality had occasional timing issues.
Those have been resolved. Current webhook performance is reliable enough that AICO has built production systems around it, treating webhooks as a core dependency rather than a best-effort feature.
SmartSenders Ordering That Works at Scale
The improvement to SmartSenders mailbox ordering is called out by Garik as a meaningful operational upgrade.
Earlier versions had friction in the purchasing flow. The addition of purchase history and a more structured ordering process resolved those issues.
"Previously I had a lot of issues with SmartSenders and how buying mailboxes worked. But since you guys rolled out the big improvement with purchase history and all that, that has been a huge boom. Really, really good. The ordering of SmartSenders mailboxes has improved a lot, which I have been really happy with."
Support and Account Management That Actually Solves Problems
Garik's view of Smartlead's support is nuanced and direct. Response times have slowed as the platform has scaled. But the quality of resolution, when contact is made, has remained high.
"When I am in contact with support, they have truly put in the effort to understand the problem and to actually be empowered to solve it. Anytime something can be done, support has always been really, really well empowered to actually solve the problem, even weird things."
The account management relationship is cited alongside the product as a reason AICO has stayed on the platform.
"I sometimes contact Vijay if I have questions or comments, and he is always willing to hop on a quick call. I think that makes me feel like I have a good account manager that I can talk to if things are not making sense, which is really, really huge."
Content and Community That Operates at Practitioner Level
"I think your guys' content is better than the other platforms. Interviewing real experts. Particularly the office hours has been tremendous."
Smartlead University and the Slack community are cited as active resources the team plans to re-engage with more regularly.
Notable Achievements
- Over 1,000 booked appointments generated for M&A clients in a single year, all with business owners, CEOs, founders, and principals considering transactions
- Twelve years of cold email operations, with AICO running entirely on Smartlead for the past two years after switching from Lemlist
- Proprietary AI-powered lead generation and appointment setting system built on top of Smartlead's API infrastructure
- Custom internal dashboard built on Smartlead's Reply Database API, enabling inbox managers to rank and prioritise M&A leads efficiently at volume
- Full send record database built from Smartlead API exports, powering custom performance analytics across mailboxes, campaigns, and copy variations
- Webhook-driven automation handling all bounce and reply processing in real time across the full client base
Top Smartlead Features Driving Results
1. API and Send Records. The foundation of AICO's proprietary analytics infrastructure. Every outbound email is exported as a structured record and loaded into AICO's own database for custom performance queries across mailboxes, campaigns, and copy. Explore Smartlead's API and automation capabilities.
2. Reply Database API. Powers AICO's internal lead prioritisation dashboard. Inbox managers work from a custom interface that ranks inbound replies by priority, ensuring the highest-value M&A leads are actioned first. Learn more about the Unified Master Inbox.
3. Webhooks. Real-time processing of bounces and replies into AICO's internal systems. Every deliverability signal and every inbound reply is handled automatically the moment it fires. Explore Smartlead's API and automation capabilities.
4. SmartSenders. Infrastructure provisioning for sending mailboxes at scale. The improvement to SmartSenders ordering has made it significantly faster to add sending capacity without operational friction. Learn more about SmartSenders.
5. SmartDelivery. Inbox placement monitoring at the technical frontier of deliverability. In an M&A outreach context where every contact is a senior executive at a private company, primary inbox placement is not optional. Check your email deliverability.
6. Ease of Scale. The structural reason AICO stayed with Smartlead after migrating from Lemlist. Adding mailboxes, adding leads, and expanding campaigns is fast and does not require proportional operational overhead.
Vision for the Future
Garik's primary feature request is a sandbox environment for the SmartSenders API. AICO is building tooling to automate mailbox purchasing programmatically, and the current limitation is that there is no way to confirm an API call behaves correctly without completing a real purchase.
"It would be really, really nice if we could fake-purchase mailboxes and have a sandbox to make sure that was built correctly when we build those tools. That would probably be the top one."
On the platform more broadly, Garik's view is direct.
Smartlead's API quality and its consistent track record of staying at the cutting edge of cold email infrastructure are the reasons AICO is still here two years after switching from Lemlist. That depth of integration is not easy to replicate elsewhere, and it is the clearest reason to stay.
Ready to build an AI-native outbound engine that books real enterprise appointments at scale?
Rajashree
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Using Smartlead has been a total game-changer and has been one of the primary drivers in our ability to generate over $12M in the pipeline for our clients last year. The Master Inbox alone has saved us a considerable amount of time, the custom tagging system and subsequences save us at least 2 hours a day.
Account Executive
I like how easy it is to launch a campaign with Smartlead and how effective it is at delivering emails. It allows me to use multiple inboxes that it creates to safely send emails in bulk. The initial setup was very easy, and this contributes to the overall user-friendliness of Smartlead.
Co-Founder, Digital Creativs
The platform and features continue to be updated and improved. Strong founder who cares about what users want to see and an amazing support team. The office hours on various topics such as email deliverability with the experts is nothing like I've seen for other SaaS products and the Smartlead Slack community is a cherry on top.
Member, Lambda Group
I love the community and their Slack channel. I'm also thrilled with the AI inbox manager after the latest update because it saves us a lot of time, eliminating the need for VAs to manage inbox tasks. The setup was quite easy and they provide really extensive documentation and a very helpful community.
Founder, Hyperke
I really appreciate the amazing customer support from Smartlead. Nobody even comes close in comparison. The founder Vaibhav is super helpful and hands-on with everything. The tool itself is reliable and technically sound. Plus, their APIs work well, which is another big plus for me.
VP of Accounts, A-SALES
A comprehensive email outreach platform that converts cold emails into consistent qualified sales meetings for us, and our clients. It helps scale outreach with unlimited mailboxes, unlimited warmups, a limitless multi-channel infrastructure, and a unified inbox so we can manage our entire revenue cycle in one place.
Founder, Reachflow
Smartlead is centered around deliverability and constantly evolving. Their API is not like any other platform. Smartlead covers all our needs. The focus on core features like deliverability and API integration is unmatched.
Co-Founder & CEO, Danish Lead Co.
Smartlead is the backbone of our cold email infrastructure. We run our entire business on your platform. We're sending plus 500,000 emails a month right now. The fact that we're able to do that and still primarily land in the inbox, all of that wouldn't have been possible without Smartlead.
Co-Founder, The Growth DNA
The decision to incorporate Smartlead was a no-brainer. Smartlead has given us the speed and flexibility to meet our clients' demands quickly.
CEO, OneThousandPieces
I use Smartlead.ai every day across all my client accounts and it's become absolutely indispensable! From the beginning, Smartlead enabled us to build client access. Everything has been driven around making people like us revenue.
Chief Executive Officer, Infoxify
It is a seasoned/advanced tool to send cold emails to your prospects. Many great features are there to improve the deliverability. Customer support is very nice, though it may take a while for you to get answer (It's not prompt response unless you are on their higher tier plan).
Founder, PLNITUDE
Game changing tool for my agency, helping us generate 6-figures+ for our lead generation clients! Client Access and white-labeling have been a game-changer, saving us countless hours. With Smartlead, I'm happy with everything, but then I check their Slack community, and there's a new feature that just dropped!
Associate Manager - Marketing
I use Smartlead for cold outreach, and it really simplifies things for me. I love how it handles the email warming up automatically and delivers emails without harming my domains. It's easy to use, and anyone can start with it, which is great. I also appreciate the option to set specific intervals between each email sent, as it just works right.
Powerful automated workflows that drive sales.
Frequently asked questions
What is Smartlead's cold email outreach software?
Smartlead's cold email outreach tool helps businesses scale their outreach efforts seamlessly. With unlimited mailboxes, fully automated email warmup functionality, a multi-channel infrastructure, and a user-friendly unibox, it empowers users to manage their entire revenue cycle in one place. Whether you're looking to streamline cold email campaigns with automated email warmups, personalization fields, automated mailbox rotation, easy integrations, and spintax, improve productivity, or enhance scalability with subsequences based on lead’s intentions, automated replies, and full white-label experience, our cold email tool implifies it in a single solution.
How does Smartlead's unlimited mailboxes feature benefit me?
Our "unlimited mailboxes" feature allows you to expand your email communications without restrictions imposed by a mailbox limit. This means you won't be constrained by artificial caps on the number of mailboxes you can connect and use. This feature makes Smartlead the best cold email software and empowers you to reach a wider audience, engage with more potential customers, and manage diverse email campaigns effectively.
What do you mean by "unibox to handle your entire revenue cycle"?
The "unibox" is one of the unique features of Smartlead cold email outreach tool, and it's a game-changer when it comes to managing your revenue cycle. The master inbox or the unibox consolidates all your outreach channels, responses, sales follow-ups, and conversions into one centralized, user-friendly mailbox.
With the "unibox," you gain the ability to:
1. Focus on closing deals: You can now say goodbye to the hassle of logging into multiple mailboxes to search for replies. The "unibox" streamlines your sales communication, allowing you to focus on what matters most—closing deals.
2. Centralized lead management: All your leads are managed from one central location, simplifying lead tracking and response management. This ensures you take advantage of every opportunity and efficiently engage with your prospects.
3. Maintain context: The "unibox" provides a 360-degree view of all your customer messages, allowing you to maintain context and deliver more personalized and effective responses.
Can Smartlead help improve my email deliverability rates?
Yes, our cold emailing software is designed to significantly improve your email deliverability rates. It enhances email deliverability through AI-powered email warmups across providers, unique IP rotating for each campaign, and dynamic ESP matching.
Real-time AI learning refines strategies based on performance, optimizing deliverability without manual adjustments. Smartlead's advanced features and strategies are designed to improve email deliverability rates, making it a robust choice for enhancing cold email campaign success.
Can I integrate Smartlead with other tools I'm using?
Certainly, Smartlead cold email tool is designed for seamless integration with a wide range of tools and platforms. Smartlead offers integration with HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Clay, Listkit, and more. You can leverage webhooks and APIs to integrate the tools you use. Try Now!
What is Smartlead, and how can it enhance my cold email campaigns?
Smartlead is a robust cold emailing software designed to transform cold emails into reliable revenue streams. Trusted by over 31,000 businesses, Smartlead excels in email deliverability, lead generation, cold email automation, and sales outreach. A unified master inbox streamlines communication management, while built-in email verification reduces bounce rates.Additionally, Smartlead offers essential tools such as CNAME, SPF Checker, DMARC Checker, Email Verifier, Blacklist Check Tool, and Email Bounce Rate Calculator for optimizing email performance.
How does Smartlead, as a cold emailing tool, automate the cold email process?
Smartlead’s robust cold email API and automation infrastructure streamline outbound communication by transforming the campaign creation and management processes. It seamlessly integrates data across software systems using APIs and webhooks, adjusts settings, and leverages AI for personalised content.
The cold emailing tool categorises lead intent, offers comprehensive email management with automated notifications, and integrates smoothly with CRMs like Zapier, Make, N8N, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. Smartlead supports scalable outreach by rapidly adding mailboxes and drip-feeding leads into active campaigns Sign Up Now!
How does Smartlead ensure my emails don't land in the spam folder?
Smartlead, the best cold email marketing tool, ensures your emails reach the intended recipients' primary inbox rather than the spam folder.
Here's how it works:
1. Our "unlimited warmups" feature is designed to build and maintain a healthy sending reputation for your cold email outreach. Instead of sending a large volume of emails all at once, which can trigger spam filters, we gradually ramp up your sending volume. This gradual approach, combined with positive email interactions, helps boost your email deliverability rates.
2. We deploy high-deliverability IP servers specific to each campaign.
3. The ‘Warmup’ feature replicates humanized email sending patterns, spintax, and smart replies.
4. By establishing a positive sender reputation and gradually increasing the number of sent emails, Smartlead minimizes the risk of your emails being flagged as spam. This way, you can be confident that your messages will consistently land in the primary inbox, increasing the likelihood of engagement and successful communication with your recipients.
What features does Smartlead offer for cold email personalisation?
Smartlead enhances cold email personalisation through advanced AI-driven capabilities and strategic integrations. Partnered with Clay, The cold remaining software facilitates efficient lead list building, enrichment from over 50 data providers, and real-time scraping for precise targeting. Hyper-personalised cold emails crafted in Clay seamlessly integrate with Smartlead campaigns.
Moreover, Smartlead employs humanised, natural email interactions and smart replies to boost engagement and response rates. Additionally, the SmartAI Bot creates persona-specific, high-converting sales copy. Also you can create persona-specific, high-converting sales copy using SmartAI Bot. You can train the AI bot to achieve 100% categorisation accuracy, optimising engagement and conversion rates.
Is Smartlead suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises?
Smartlead accommodates both small businesses and large enterprises with flexible pricing and comprehensive features. The Basic Plan at $39/month suits small businesses and solopreneurs, offering 2000 active leads and 6000 monthly emails, alongside essential tools like unlimited email warm-up and detailed analytics.
Marketers and growing businesses benefit from the Pro Plan ($94/month), with 30000 active leads and 150000 monthly emails, plus a custom CRM and active support. Lead generation agencies and large enterprises can opt for the Custom Plan ($174/month), providing up to 12 million active lead credits and 60 million emails, with advanced CRM integration and customisation options.