Operand, a new AI-first startup founded by Ram Gorthi, Arjun Sahney, and Akhil Iyengar, has announced a $3.1 million seed round to transform how strategic business decisions - starting with pricing - are made in modern companies.

With backing from premier investors such as Felicis, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Soma Capital, and Ali Rowghani, Operand is developing a powerful artificial intelligence engine designed to replace traditional management consulting - not with decks, but with decision-making software.

Their first frontier: pricing strategy.

Pricing, historically viewed as both art and science, has remained an expensive, consultant-led process for most companies. Operand wants to change that by building tools that ingest real business data and generate live strategic recommendations that can be deployed in-market - fast, affordable, and backed by machine learning, not outdated frameworks.

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Why Pricing Strategy Is the Beachhead

Pricing is not just a revenue lever - it's one of the most under-optimized assets in business.

According to a McKinsey study, a 1% improvement in pricing can lead to an 11% increase in operating profits. Yet despite this impact, most companies revisit their pricing once a year - or never. The status quo relies on anecdotal competitor benchmarks, static spreadsheets, and the occasional consulting engagement that costs six figures or more.

Operand’s solution focuses on automating the insight generation process. Its AI platform integrates with financial systems, CRM tools, customer segments, and behavioral data to recommend optimal pricing moves in real-time. This includes:

• Dynamic price banding across customer segments
  
• Profit-maximizing price points using elasticity modeling
  
• Competitor-aware simulations for product tiers and bundles
  

By launching with pricing as the initial wedge, Operand is tackling a painful, high-ROI decision-making category that opens the door to broader strategy automation in the future.

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The $200B+ Consulting Industry Is Vulnerable to AI Disruption

Management consulting as a category is ripe for disruption. Globally, the consulting services market is worth over $200 billion, with pricing, go-to-market, and growth strategy being among the top-requested services by mid-market and enterprise companies.

But legacy consulting is slow, expensive, and often detached from the actual execution layer.

Here’s the shift Operand is betting on:

• Businesses want faster answers to complex questions.
  
• They need tools that generate repeatable decisions, not just reports.
  
• And they want pricing, revenue, and operational recommendations that are data-driven, not slide-driven.
  

By embedding these principles into AI-powered software, Operand isn’t just offering insights. It’s delivering repeatable strategic engines that grow smarter with use.

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The Signal Most Startups Miss in Product Strategy

Operand’s early traction can be traced to one subtle but powerful choice: they prioritized business teams over technical teams in product development.

While it’s easy for AI startups to start with engineering-heavy use cases, Operand did something different. They focused on decision-makers in finance, growth, and operations - teams that traditionally rely on consultants, not dashboards.

This enabled them to win early users from non-technical roles who felt underserved by product analytics or BI tools. Operand’s interfaces don’t require SQL. They ask questions in business language, like:

• “What is the revenue impact of raising prices 5% on Tier 2?”
  
• “Which SKUs are underperforming by customer segment?”
  
• “Where are we leaving margin on the table?”
  

This product language alignment made user onboarding faster, but more importantly, it made retention stronger. Business stakeholders didn’t just understand Operand - they depended on it to make weekly decisions.

If you’re building a B2B AI tool, here’s what’s worth considering:
The highest willingness to pay isn’t always in technical departments. It’s where strategic blind spots are largest - and the appetite to reduce consulting spend is highest. Sometimes that’s marketing. Sometimes it’s pricing. Sometimes it’s supply chain.

But always, it’s where Excel and external consultants are still in charge.

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Operand’s Go-to-Market Advantage

Operand’s value proposition is compelling for three reasons:

1. High ROI from day one – Pricing optimization offers measurable revenue impact, quickly.
   
2. Cross-functional applicability – Once inside an org, Operand can expand into finance, ops, and marketing use cases.
   
3. Consulting displacement – Companies already budget heavily for consultants. Operand replaces them at a fraction of the cost, with far greater repeatability.
   

Early feedback from pilot users suggests that Operand helps compress 3-month consulting projects into 30-minute AI-powered planning sessions - with live data, adjustable assumptions, and instant modeling.

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Market Momentum for AI in Strategic Decisioning

Operand enters a rapidly expanding landscape of AI strategy platforms.

While most current enterprise AI tools focus on sales automation, customer support, or document summarization, Operand is part of a newer wave: AI for C-level decisions.

According to Gartner, by 2026, 30% of new strategic decisions will be made with the help of AI models trained on organizational data. This shift is being accelerated by rising enterprise data readiness and the desire for continuous decision-making frameworks, not just periodic reviews.

The consulting replacement theme is no longer theoretical - it’s in motion.

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What’s Next for Operand

The team plans to use this funding round to expand their pricing intelligence suite and begin work on adjacent modules for:

• Market entry strategy
  
• Cost optimization
  
• Product bundling and discounting engines
  
• Customer segmentation insights
  

They’re also building out integrations with major ERPs and CRM platforms to offer plug-and-play decision intelligence that companies can deploy without needing armies of analysts or consultants.

As the product grows, Operand is well-positioned to evolve into the "strategy layer" of the modern enterprise tech stack - offering real-time recommendations that reduce decision cycles from months to hours.

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Final Thoughts

Operand is betting on a future where software can think like a strategist - not just report on past performance. And they’re not starting with pie-in-the-sky AI. They’re starting with a well-defined, high-impact use case: pricing.

The real innovation isn’t just that Operand replaces consultants - it’s that it turns strategy into a daily, data-driven workflow, rather than a quarterly project. And in doing so, it redefines how business teams interact with intelligence.

For founders, there’s a reminder here:
The most scalable startups don’t just replace manual work. They replace manual decision-making.