How Intelligencia AI Sold Their First Enterprise Customer Without a Sales Team
Every founder chasing their first enterprise deal faces the same pressure: hire salespeople, build a pipeline, start demoing fast. The conventional wisdom is clear—you need a sales machine to land big customers.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Dimitrios Skaltsas, CEO and Co-Founder of Intelligencia AI, shared how he ignored that advice completely. No sales team. No aggressive outbound. Just nine months of heads-down building followed by a strategy that sounds insane until you understand the industry he was selling into.
Here’s how Intelligencia AI signed a major pharmaceutical company as their first customer in 2019—and what that playbook teaches about selling complex technology to conservative buyers.
The Setup: Why Pharma Won’t Buy Promises
Pharma isn’t like SaaS, where you can sell on vision. It’s not like fintech, where early adopters take risks on unproven technology.
Dimitrios describes those early conversations by referencing Moneyball: “You’re this, in many ways, you’re this toppy young guy who, you know, speaks a different language, and people are not sure they get it right.”
The pharmaceutical industry was making billion-dollar decisions using benchmarks and expert opinions. “You have this paradox where science is trade season making. Science is suboptimal, it’s not evolved enough,” Dimitrios explains.
How do you convince an industry that moves at a glacial pace to trust a startup with AI technology they barely understand? The answer wasn’t better sales tactics. It was better proof.
The Contrarian Move: Build for Nine Months Before Selling Anything
While most startups follow the lean startup playbook—talk to customers, sell before you build—Dimitrios did the opposite.
“We started product first, and for many years, actually, we have retained that money, but we built something,” he explains. They launched in fall 2017 and spent months building their MVP without reaching out to potential customers.
This wasn’t naiveté. It was strategic. In an industry where innovation propensity is “unfortunately a bit backwards” outside of core drug development, promises mean nothing. Scientists need to see results first.
“We had the first results in sometime late spring 2018,” Dimitrios recalls. Only then did they start reaching out. Nine months of building before a single sales conversation—an eternity for a bootstrapped startup, but the minimum viable proof pharma required.
Finding the Right First Customer: Innovation Teams Inside Big Pharma
The conventional wisdom says startups should sell to other startups—they move faster, they understand your constraints, they’re willing to take risks. Dimitrios ignored this too.
Intelligencia AI’s first customer wasn’t a scrappy biotech. It was a major pharmaceutical company. But—and this is critical—it was specifically their external innovation function.
“They were building this external innovation function where it’s a function where they look for new drugs from smaller companies, from biotech, and by default, they were building something that was forward looking and they want to embed. Innovate elements were the perfect match,” Dimitrios explains.
This is pattern recognition gold for B2B founders: Look for innovation teams inside conservative organizations. They have three things startups need:
- Budget – Enterprise-level contracts, not startup budgets
- Problems worth solving – Real pain points that justify new solutions
- Political capital – Permission to try new approaches
These teams exist because the larger organization knows it needs to innovate but can’t do it through normal channels. They’re your bridge between startup agility and enterprise scale.
The Timeline: Patience as a Competitive Advantage
The full timeline:
- Fall 2017: Founded, started building
- Late Spring 2018: Had results, began outreach
- Early 2019: Signed first customer
That’s 15-18 months from founding to first revenue. Dimitrios frames it as necessary patience: “It took some time and took a lot of faith on our, and ultimately also on our customers. That’s a conservative industry, for all good reason.”
The key word: “faith.” Not faith in marketing promises, but faith built through demonstrated results.
What Made the Difference: Results First, Relationships Second
Dimitrios is clear about what actually closed the deal. It wasn’t a brilliant pitch deck. It wasn’t aggressive follow-up. It was having something undeniable to show.
When they finally did approach customers with their MVP and early results, “We listened, we embedded feedback into our product, and that’s how created what I think is an industry leading solution now, but synthesized, you know, it took some time.”
Notice the sequence: Results → Conversations → Listening → Iteration → Industry-leading solution.
Most founders start with conversations and hope to get to results. Dimitrios started with results and used conversations to make them better.
This is especially powerful in conservative industries. When you walk in with proof, you flip the dynamic. Instead of you trying to convince them your unproven technology might work, they’re asking how they can be part of making proven technology better.
The Principle Behind the Playbook
The deeper lesson isn’t “always build first” or “wait nine months before selling.” Those are tactics specific to Intelligencia AI’s context—deep tech, conservative industry, complex problem.
The principle is this: Match your sales motion to your buyer’s risk tolerance and decision-making speed.
Fast-moving industries with high risk tolerance? Sell early, iterate publicly, move fast.
Conservative industries with low risk tolerance? Build credibility through results, move deliberately, earn trust.
Dimitrios understood something crucial about pharma: “It’s highly regulated for all the right reasons. And yeah, people are highly sophisticated and very careful on how they do things for all the good reasons.”
He didn’t fight that culture. He worked within it by building the credibility pharma required before asking for a decision.
Why This Works (And When It Doesn’t)
This playbook works when:
- You’re solving a hair-on-fire problem (pharma’s 85-90% failure rate)
- Your buyers are sophisticated enough to evaluate complex technology
- You have the runway for patient building
It doesn’t work when you need rapid validation, when your problem isn’t critical, or when your market moves fast.
The meta-lesson: Don’t copy tactics. Understand the principles that make tactics work, then apply them to your context. Dimitrios matched his go-to-market motion to his market’s reality. That’s the playbook.
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