InstaLILY just closed a $60 million round to prove AI agents can run sales and operations for companies that sell pipes, parts and rental equipment, not just software.
A national industrial distributor added more than $200 million in new annual sales after handing sales prospecting to software built by InstaLILY. That's the number selling the pitch. No demo could do it better, and it's why Energize Capital just led a $60 million Series B into the company behind it.
InstaLILY, founded in New York in 2023 by Amit Shah and Sumantro Das, announced the round this week alongside the launch of Lily, which the company calls the world's first AI "Forward Deployed Engineer." Insight Partners increased its existing stake, and two strategic names joined: Home Depot Ventures and United Rentals, both companies whose businesses are exactly the messy, physical-goods operations InstaLILY is built for. The new capital pushes InstaLILY's total funding to nearly $100 million, according to the company's announcement carried by Morningstar and SiliconANGLE. Revenue grew five times over the past year.
Here's what makes InstaLILY different from the wave of AI coding assistants and chatbots flooding the market. Lily doesn't just answer questions or write code on request. It embeds inside a business, learns how that specific operation works, writes the software the business actually needs, and goes live within days rather than the months a typical enterprise software rollout takes. Then it stays. Unlike a consultant or a contractor who ships a project and leaves, Lily keeps adjusting the software as the business itself changes, according to the company's own description of the product.
InstaLILY calls its agents "InstaWorkers," and it has deliberately aimed them at industries that rarely get AI headlines: construction, industrial distribution, logistics and healthcare. Since its Series A, the company has gone live inside SRS Distribution, part of the Home Depot family, along with United Rentals, ShipStation Global, PartsTown, Radwell International, Henry Schein, PartsSource and Kedrion Biopharma, according to the company's funding announcement.
That customer list explains why Home Depot Ventures and United Rentals didn't just buy the product. They invested in the company that built it. When a corporate venture arm writes a check into a vendor already running inside its own operations, that's a different signal than a typical strategic investment made from the sidelines. It says the technology already survived contact with a real supply chain.
The $200 million distributor result is worth sitting with. Sales teams at industrial distributors can only chase so many accounts by hand. Lily's software reportedly worked the distributor's entire customer base for revenue opportunities that a human sales force would never get to. That's a scale problem. AI is well suited to solve it when the underlying task is pattern matching against a known catalog and known customers, not judgment calls requiring deep context a machine doesn't have.
What this signals for the AI agent market
The broader argument around AI agents replacing knowledge workers has mostly run on demos and vendor promises - with the occasional benchmark score thrown in. InstaLILY's raise arrives with something rarer: a named, attributable revenue figure from an actual industrial customer, verified through the company's own disclosure and reported by outlets including Reuters via TradingView and Modern Distribution Management. That's different. It's a meaningfully different kind of evidence than a chatbot transcript.
It also suggests where the money is actually flowing in AI right now. Not every dollar is chasing a general-purpose model or a consumer app. Energize Capital, Insight Partners, Home Depot Ventures and United Rentals just bet real capital on vertical AI labor built for unglamorous, physical-economy industries where the work is quoting parts, planning delivery routes, diagnosing broken equipment in the field. That's the bet.
Whether InstaLILY can keep growing revenue five times a year as it moves beyond its current customer roster is the open question. But the Series B, and the strategic investors attached to it, indicate that at least a few large industrial players think the answer is yes, and are willing to fund the company that proved it inside their own operations first.
Also read: Shai Morag Raises $60 Million to Build an Identity System for AI Agents • Sequoia Capital Pours $45 Million Into an AI Startup That Calls Its Product an Employee • A Leaked Kimi K3 Promo Page Shows Moonshot Chasing an Edge Claude Already Has
