Niv Oppenhaim: The Future of Agentic Workflows | Subscription Heroes #27

Swan is not just another AI startup. With only three founders and nearly 200 paying customers, the company is showing what it looks like to build an AI-native business from day one.

Niv Oppenhaim, co-founder and CTO, leads Swan’s push to create an AI-native GTM platform powered by autonomous agents. In this episode, he shared how the team navigated early challenges, why they made a bold bet on large language models, and how they are thinking about the future.

Early Technical Challenges

When Swan first started, getting AI to produce useful outputs for different organizations was hard. Cold emails often fell flat because the models were not advanced enough to handle personalization at scale.

Rather than walking away, the team made a strategic choice. They built Swan on the belief that language models would quickly become faster, cheaper, and better. That decision shaped everything that followed.

The Agent First Mindset

Swan’s culture is built on a simple question: can an agent solve this?

Instead of defaulting to hiring or building manual processes, the founders look for ways to hand the work to agents. Today, agents handle a large portion of Swan’s operations. About 85 percent of customer support tickets are resolved automatically, while humans step in for the most sensitive requests. On the marketing side, agents manage workflows across content, outreach, and engagement.

This approach allows a team of just three people to support a growing customer base without getting bogged down in repetitive work.

Building Moats in a Crowded Market

In today’s noisy AI landscape, Swan knows that technology alone is not enough. Two elements give the company staying power.

The first is contextual memory. Over time Swan’s system builds a deep understanding of each customer. It remembers preferences, tone of voice, ICP definitions, and even competitors. That accumulated knowledge is hard to replicate.

The second is brand trust. In a market where many companies claim to be AI powered, delivering consistent value and earning credibility with customers is critical.

The Team Philosophy

For now, Swan remains just the three founders, supported by their network of agents. But growth means more hands will eventually be needed.

The first hires will likely focus on community and super-user growth, turning satisfied customers into champions of the product. After that, the team will look to bring in more engineering talent.

What they are not looking for are traditional narrow specialists. Swan wants high-agency generalists who can zoom out to see the big picture and still be willing to dive into details. Every person has to make a meaningful impact.

What’s Next

Looking ahead, Swan plans to expand its integrations, strengthen its agents’ capabilities, and scale its customer base without bloating the team.

For Oppenhaim and his co-founders, the goal is not just building another SaaS tool. It is proving that a company can run in a fundamentally different way. Lean, adaptable, and powered by agents.