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.
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 can really control how many sales calls you take and how many you convert with just cold email, it is really hard to beat."
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.
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.
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."
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."
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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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."
"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.
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.
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.
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Founder, StackOptimise
Smartlead's combination of automation, unlimited inboxes, and easy campaign management has completely transformed how we run cold email campaigns.
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Founder, Cold Email Hackers
We have about 15 companies and we use Smartlead for all of them.
Founder, DutchSave Media
One of the things I love about using Smartlead is the deliverability feature. If they landed in the bounce or spam folders, we could resolve this quickly.
Co-Founder, Growth Today
I want to continue to use Smartlead to make operations more seamless - the plan is to bring more clients here and build more SOPs.
Founder, FueltoFly
Smartlead listens to the agencies and customers and builds according to what people want, that has really made things easier for us.
Founder, OutboundSync
We build an infrastructure product, and OutboundSync communicates with Smartlead itself. I love the webhook and API. They're really well done and keep getting better.
Founder, Axoleads
With SmartDelivery, you can put all of that in the hands of the tool. It ensures your emails land in inboxes, and by running a simple test, you can see if you're hitting the mark.
Founder, Claygen
Deliverability is the cornerstone of cold email outreach. You could have the best email copy in the world, but if no one is seeing it, it's useless. I really love the feature where you can actually give client accesses to your clients.
Co-Founder, Cymate
I do not want to switch to another software. Pick a solution you trust, stick with it, and keep refining your copy.
CMO, Avalanche Capital
Managing large volumes of emails through multiple inboxes used to be a logistical nightmare. With Smartlead, the process is seamless. We book thousands of discovery calls through cold emails. These campaigns are generating leads at a scale we never thought possible.
Founder, Growth Engine X
We came for the unlimited inboxes, and we stayed for the API. 1.5M cold emails/month, 7,767+ inboxes managed.
Head of Community & Ecosystem, TxtCart
You cannot replace having 10,000 touches with potential clients. When you have that much distribution and reach, you really start to see incredible results. The simplicity of Smartlead made all the difference. It doesn't require you to be a technical wizard.
Founder, Hyperke
Smartlead has been a game-changer for us. It increased our appointment volume, improved ease of use, and offered valuable features. 80% increase in appointments/month, peak of 276 appointments in a single month.
Founder, Kinetyca
Smartlead has been our cold email backbone from day one. The platform evolves constantly, keeping pace with how deliverability and personalization need to work today. 21% overall reply rate, $175K in 4 months for multiple B2B clients.
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.
CEO, Halfwarm
Our approach to crafting conversational emails led to reply rates that many of my peers thought were unattainable.
Co-Founder, letstrike
We've grown on zero capital, zero marketing, purely cold emailing - and that's the story we love to tell. The best approach is no approach if you can't handle domain meltdown. The second best is something like Smartlead that's built from the ground up for deliverability at scale.
Founder, Fenixtal
Smartlead's white-labeling and automation let us punch above our weight. The 12M euros sales potential? That's what happens when you combine human creativity with Smartlead's precision.
Co-Founder, Digital Creativs
Nine out of 10. Ninety percent of our clients are on Smartlead unless they come in with an existing setup. That's the default.
Co-Founder, BuildingReach
At the end of the day, you have to take a bet on one tool or another. It was a no-brainer taking that bet on Smartlead. We had to even turn down the volume of our marketing campaigns - Smartlead was capable of driving more volume than our sales team was able to fulfill.
Founder & MD, Prospectiv
Since starting the business in January of this year, we've already generated $200K in sales exclusively from cold email. Smartlead has been central to our operations and has exceeded our expectations.
Founder, Growthlynk
There's so much stuff built on top of it. I would be dead if I had to rebuild it with another tool. I can manage hundreds of senders easily. I can send hundreds of thousands of emails.
Founder, Corebits
The platform's HubSpot integration, real-time Slack updates, and advanced campaign customization have been game changers for our business and our clients'.
Founder, Apex Ascension
From day one, we've never used anything else.
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