NextLM, an artificial intelligence (AI)-native behavioral sales intelligence platform, is close to appointing an advisor to run a planned majority private-equity recapitalization, co-founder and CEO Chris Anzalone said.

The New York-based company expects to launch the process in the fourth quarter of 2026 or the first quarter of 2027, he added.

NextLM expects to hire a larger accounting firm ahead of the transaction, Anzalone said. Cooley is its corporate law firm.

According to Anzalone, NextLM was valued at about USD 50m in a June SAFE round. The company reached more than USD 1m in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within 87 days of its January 2026 commercial launch. It is cash-flow positive and expects to end 2026 with USD 5m-USD 7m in ARR, the CEO said. Its pipeline stands at about USD 25m.

Recap proceeds would go primarily toward scaling headcount in customer experience and sales as the company moves up-market toward larger enterprise accounts, Anzalone said.

Anzalone co-founded NextLM in September 2025 alongside Chief of Staff Amer Ahmad. It has raised about USD 2m to date, entirely through SAFEs, Anzalone said, including USD 1.2m at a USD 12m valuation cap and a further USD 500,000 in the June round. The two co-founders hold more than 94% of the business, he added, a stake that would fall to roughly 80%-85% once the SAFEs convert. Backers include Convoi Ventures, Innovent Capital Group, Remedy Product Studio, and Team Ignite Ventures.

NextLM’s platform analyzes online behavior to identify which companies, and individuals within them, are in the market to buy, then surfaces those accounts and contacts by name for sales teams. Rather than run every client on a shared model, it builds each customer its own.

The company serves small firms to large enterprises, with its base skewing toward enterprise. It has six employees and more than 200 customers, primarily US-based, across verticals including finance, executive search, recruiting, and software. Average contract value is around USD 20,000 and growing, with some enterprise deals running to “many six figures,” Anzalone said.

The business runs natively inside Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise and is available on Google Cloud Marketplace under a collaboration formed in August. It also is a member of NVIDIA’s global startup program Inception. NextLM says it scores 1,000 prospects for roughly USD 0.003, against USD 0.26 to USD 5.11 for frontier-model APIs — more than an order of magnitude cheaper than even the lowest-cost frontier model.

Anzalone divides the peer landscape into three tiers: data aggregators including ZoomInfo and Apollo.io; established intent players such as Bombora, 6sense, and Demandbase; and a newer signal-based startups like Unify, Common Room (a division of Zoom Communications), and Finny. Other players include Clay, Cognism, and UserGems.

Anzalone expects consolidation to accelerate, with the large legacy players “trying to acquire their way out of what they can’t build.”

Recent deals in the space include Zoom’s purchase of Common Room, HubSpot’s purchase of person-level buyer-intent platform Warmly, and Apollo.io’s acquisition of buying-signal startup Pocus. Clay reached a USD 5bn valuation in a DST Global-led secondary share sale in January 2026, after a 2025 USD 100m Series C at a USD 3.1bn valuation led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund.

In 2025, Salesforce acquired data-management provider Informatica for about USD 8bn; Clearlake Capital took Dun & Bradstreet private for USD 7.7bn including debt, at a USD 4.1bn equity value; Clari and Salesloft merged with roughly USD 450m in combined ARR; and Unify raised a USD 40m Series B at a USD 260m valuation led by Battery Ventures, with the OpenAI Startup Fund participating.

Anzalone sees AI flooding the market with noise, a shift he expects to push humans back into selling. Full automation is unlikely this decade, he said, as the market moves from sheer volume of outreach toward pinpointing the few prospects most likely to close.

Before NextLM, Anzalone founded and was CEO of sales-development agency DemandCapture, after a career spanning institutional capital formation, public-market trading, and strategy consulting.