Nooks Expands Seattle Engineering Hub as AI Sales Automation Race Heats Up

In a bold move that bucks the prevailing Silicon Valley migration narrative, San Francisco-based AI startup Nooks is doubling down on Seattle, rapidly scaling its engineering team in the Emerald City while many local startups head south.

The company, which specializes in AI-powered sales productivity software, has grown its Seattle engineering presence from zero to six engineers in recent months, with aggressive hiring underway for additional platform and product roles. The expansion comes as Nooks prepares to open a dedicated Seattle office, currently operating out of investor Tola Capital’s Seattle space during the ramp-up phase.

“Seattle represents a unique pocket of talent,” explains Nikhil Cheerla, Nooks’ co-founder and CTO. “We’re finding engineers here who have built scalable systems at large tech companies and are now eager to join fast-growing startups pushing the boundaries of applied AI.”

This westward expansion from the Bay Area arrives amid heated discussions about “talent drift” in the Seattle tech ecosystem. While some founders have recently announced relocations to San Francisco and Washington state lawmakers debate new tax proposals, Nooks is making the contrarian bet that Seattle’s engineering depth—particularly talent migrating from tech giants—creates fertile ground for AI innovation.

The Seattle expansion isn’t happening in isolation. Other San Francisco companies have recently established or expanded their presence in the region, including Binti (software startup), OpenAI (which recently inked a massive lease in Bellevue), and xAI (Elon Musk’s AI venture, also landing in Bellevue). This creates a growing corridor of AI innovation stretching from Seattle to the Eastside.

Nooks’ journey to this moment is a study in startup evolution. Founded in 2020 by Cheerla and his co-founders, the company began as a virtual classroom tool during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many startups, they pivoted—first to a virtual collaboration product, then discovered the intricate pain points of sales while trying to land their own customers. This customer discovery process revealed an opportunity: sales teams drowning in repetitive tasks while craving meaningful customer interactions.

Today, Nooks builds AI-driven productivity software that aims to eliminate the “busywork” surrounding outbound sales. Their platform handles account research, email composition, dialing and voicemail management, call summarization, and next-step recommendations—all while keeping human sales representatives firmly in control of judgment and relationship-building decisions.

The sales software market is notoriously crowded, with entrenched players like Seattle-based Outreach and Highspot (which recently announced a merger with Seismic in a major industry consolidation). Nooks differentiates itself by creating what Cheerla calls a “feedback loop”—integrating data, intelligence, and execution within the same workspace. This architecture allows the system to observe what successful sales representatives actually do and refine its recommendations accordingly.

This week marks a significant milestone as Nooks rolls out its Agent Workspace, a collaborative environment where human sales reps and AI agents work side-by-side on prospecting, sequencing, dialing, and LinkedIn follow-ups. The system learns from team behaviors and scales those best practices across the organization.

The company’s momentum is backed by impressive metrics. Nooks raised a $43 million Series B in October 2024, and since then claims revenue growth of 6X. The company has expanded from 90 to approximately 200 employees in just one year, serving customers including HubSpot, Rippling, ZoomInfo, Toast, and Vanta.

Sheila Gulati, managing director at Tola Capital, sees Nooks as a pioneer in bringing AI directly into revenue-generating workflows. “Nooks is the company evolving the sales experience through AI,” Gulati stated. “I’m excited to see Nooks expand into Seattle and deepen its impact across our ecosystem.”

To mark the expansion and showcase Seattle’s growing importance in the AI landscape, Nooks and Tola Capital are co-hosting a Seattle event on February 26 focused on domain-specific AI agents deployed in production. The event features speakers including Cheerla, Chinmay Barve (Nooks’ VP of Engineering), Sharbani Roy from Arm, and Joe Duffy from Pulumi.

As Seattle positions itself as a serious contender in the AI arms race, Nooks’ expansion represents more than just another office opening—it’s a strategic bet on the city’s engineering talent pool and a potential catalyst for further AI investment in the region.

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