Startup Donnager AI raises $1.5 million pre-seed funding to transform cold outreach personalization to help startup founders

​​Originally published by TechBeat Canada on June 3, 2025.

Toronto’s vibrant AI startup ecosystem has a new contender with the launch of Donnager AI, a company focused on solving one of the toughest challenges faced by founders: creating personalized cold outreach messages at scale.

Donnager AI officially emerged from stealth today, announcing a $1.5 million pre-seed investment led by a prominent global consulting firm, with participation from a select group of angel investors.

The Donnager platform helps founders and sales teams craft highly personalized intro lines by analyzing target leads’ LinkedIn profiles, company websites, blog posts, podcasts, and more — generating human-like, customized icebreakers designed to significantly boost reply rates.

“Technical founders often build incredible products but struggle to generate conversations with decision-makers,” said Nagaraj Kuppuswamy, co-founder, and CEO of Donnager AI. “Outreach today is either generic or demands an overwhelming amount of manual effort. We wanted to build an engine that sounds like you — but operates at scale.”

Donnager AI was created after the founder of Beaconer, a cybersecurity startup, struggled with low cold email response rates and unscalable manual personalization. Realizing that existing tools lacked quality and authenticity, they built an internal LLM to generate founder-style intros. When it proved effective, they turned it into Donnager AI — a tool designed to help founders scale outreach with deep personalization. Unlike generic platforms, Donnager crawls beyond LinkedIn, analyzing blogs, podcasts, and news to craft human-like messages. It combines smart lead filtering with scalable personalization, helping users stand out and grow faster.

With the funding secured, Donnager AI plans to expand its engineering team, enhance its AI capabilities, and scale its go-to-market efforts across North America. Recruitment for engineering, AI research, and customer success roles is already underway.

“Our vision is simple,” Nagaraj said. “We want to empower founders — especially technical ones — with a sales engine that feels like a human partner, not a robot.”

Toronto’s rapidly growing AI scene provides fertile ground for Donnager’s ambitions. Backed by a rich talent pool and a strong support network for startups, Donnager AI is positioning itself to become a key player in the next generation of personalization technologies.