16. Jay Mirpuri, GTM Lead at Light - From a Failed AI Startup to Building an Outbound Sales Engine, Why Cold Calling Still Wins in B2B Sales

Jay Mirpuri leads GTM at Light, an AI native finance platform, and he built its cold calling program from nothing into a team that books 30 to 35 meetings a week. Before that, his first startup failed. He built Alchemy, an AI marketing agency, moved to London to launch it, and struggled without local connections or a clear customer profile. So he cold messaged Jonathan Sanders, founder of Light, using a three pronged pitch built on his own founder story and a shared CFA Level 1. It worked, and he became Light's first sales hire. Light replaces the patchwork of Xero instances and 12 month NetSuite rollouts that scaling companies get stuck with, closing a $13M seed from Atomico and a $30M Series A in September 2025 out of its Copenhagen HQ. Jay breaks down why cold calling still beats email in B2B sales when most competitors have given up on it, how his eight BDRs earn the right to pitch inside the first ten seconds, and the thought leadership events that built his earliest pipeline. He also gets into why he changed his mind on hiring technical BDRs, how Light's Astra system catches financial anomalies without the hallucination risk of generative AI, and the story of Keyshot, a client that scaled from $5M to $30M ARR with one CFO and a part time bookkeeper. If you are building an outbound sales team from zero, wondering whether cold calling still works, or curious where AI in finance is heading, this one is worth your time.