Salah Hasanain’s AI demo agent heads to pre-seed

An AI demo agent that grabs the mouse, opens the real product, and talks the prospect through it while they watch is no longer a lab trick at Repixa. It is the whole company. Built from Baghdad by sole founder Salah Hasanain, US-incorporated, and aimed at global B2B SaaS, Repixa’s agent Laura does not play a recording and does not walk a cloned tour. She clicks the live interface, answers out loud, and changes path the moment someone asks a harder question. The startup is now raising a $500,000 pre-seed on the back of that loop, and it is using Laura to sell Laura. That last detail is the punch. Most sales tools still beg for a calendar slot. Hasanain flipped the funnel. Interested visitors start a session now. No form purgatory, no “does Tuesday work,” no two-day wait while intent goes cold. In early tests across hundreds of sessions, mainly with B2B SaaS and AI-native firms, roughly 6 to 11 percent of website visitors began a Repixa demo. A conventional inbound flow, he argues, is lucky if about 1 percent ever book a human call. Outbound is just as leaky. Those start-rate numbers are early, self-reported, and not a close rate. They are still a jolt. If even a slice of that lift holds, the missing layer in the sales stack just moved. The technical dare is what makes the story worth watching. Almost every other step in B2B selling already runs on software: prospecting, sequences, scoring, CRM hygiene, and follow-up. Showing the product, actually driving it live in front of a stranger who can interrupt, stayed human and synchronous. Computer-use agents can grind through background tasks. A live demo has no such mercy. The model has to hear speech, speak back, find the right screen, recover from a miss, and keep the room from going quiet. Hasanain was not sure that loop would hold when he started. He says it does now. Hundreds of sessions later, people stay, ask, and click rather than demanding a human in the first minute. Buyer habits are shifting under the product. Teams already let models brief them before they take a call. Waiting a week to “see the tool” is starting to feel antique. Laura is built for that mood: start now, ask anything, and watch the real UI move. Human reps still own the close. The agent’s job is to stop wasting the hottest hour of the week on first-look walkthroughs. The $500,000 pre-seed is the next scene, not the ending. Talks with angels and VCs are open. Names stay off the record until paper is signed. Hasanain wants backers who already live in agentic systems and global SaaS, not a cheque that shrinks the map to one city. The money is meant for the control layer, more commercial proof, and a first proper team. He is hiring as he raises. Here is the MENA twist, and it is not another hub speech. Iraq’s startup stories usually stay home: local commerce, payments, and reconstruction. Repixa does not. A founder in Baghdad is shipping a computer-use agent at English-language SaaS teams worldwide, from a city that almost never appears on AI infrastructure maps. His line is simple and sharp. Where you build from should not cap how large a market you can attack. That is a different regional plot from sovereign model labs and packaged Gulf scale-ups. It is one person, one live agent, and one global category. The caveats are real and they belong in the same paragraph as the spark. No named customers. No disclosed revenue. The 6 to 11 percent start rate has not been audited. Computer-use agents still break on messy production UIs. Serious buyers will drag the product through security review; Repixa says it isolates environments, limits actions, is GDPR compliant, and is working toward SOC 2 Type I. Demos are only the first surface. The same system could run onboarding, training, support, and other live software work. That is ambition until a second logo shows up. If Laura keeps turning quiet traffic into hands-on time, Repixa has a wedge the sales stack has been missing. If the agent stumbles when the UI gets ugly, the magic trick ends. The pre-seed is the clock. Baghdad is already running it.