Sable vs Karumi: Two Opposite Ways to Buy an AI Demo Agent (And a Third Option)

Quick Takeaways

• Sable and Karumi are both live AI agents that demo software, sold in opposite directions: Sable is a $45M Sequoia- and 8VC-backed enterprise "AI employee" with no published pricing and a customer waitlist, while YC-backed Karumi publishes a $900/mo Self-Serve plan you can buy straight from its pricing page.
• Sable's agent Aidan runs customer calls with real-time browser use and vision inside LiveBox, a virtual machine hosting a functional copy of your product, and is in production at Notion and Decagon.
• Karumi's agent joins live video calls around the clock and drives your actual product through autonomous browser control, launchable from landing pages, in-app, or outbound email links.
• Both are unusually well certified for their age: Sable shows SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, and GDPR; Karumi lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and GDPR.
• Full disclosure: we build Naoma, a competing AI demo agent with published pricing from $299/mo on engagement-based billing, covered as the third option at the end.

Start with the disclosure: Naoma, the company publishing this, competes with both products here. We wrote the comparison anyway because "Sable vs Karumi" is a search with no good answer — the two sit at opposite ends of the same young category, and neither has profiled the other. Everything below comes from their sites, investor materials, and press, anchored as of August 2026; the final section pitches our own product, clearly labeled.

What makes this pairing interesting is not feature overlap; it is that two companies answer the same buyer question with opposite business models. Sable sells an enterprise "AI employee" through a waitlist and a custom contract, with $45M from Sequoia Capital and 8VC behind it. Karumi, a Y Combinator company running on $500K, puts a $900/month price on its website and lets you start the entry plan without speaking to anyone. Same job, opposite buying motions — which is exactly the choice most teams evaluating this category face.

Quick comparison

What Sable does

Sable builds Aidan, billed as "the first AI employee powered by real-time browser use and vision" that runs customer calls at scale. The San Francisco company was founded in October 2025 by four Harvard-connected founders and announced a $45M round in July 2026, co-led by Sequoia Capital and 8VC with both firms taking board seats. Fortune reported that Sequoia's Shaun Maguire committed after watching Aidan glide from English into Mandarin and then Spanish in the middle of a demo.

Aidan works inside LiveBox, a virtual machine hosting a functional copy of your product, so the agent and the customer interact with the same environment in real time. Full-duplex speech lets it listen while talking, an organization-level "context graph" updates after every interaction, and Sable says the agent speaks dozens of languages without publishing a count. The scope is deliberately wider than demos — qualification, onboarding, feature launches, partner certification, user training, new-hire training — and Sable assembles each agent's brain from seller recordings, expert interviews, and marketing materials.

Deployment is the headline proof: Notion runs Aidan for setup sessions, demos, and partner enablement, Decagon has it in production, and Sable claims a 150+ company waitlist ahead of any public launch. The compliance stack — SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, and the rare ISO 42001 AI-management standard — runs deeper than most vendors twice its age. What does not exist as of August 2026: a pricing page, a free trial, a public review, or even an official product video to embed here.

What Karumi does

Karumi is a Y Combinator Fall 2025 company from San Francisco, founded by Toni Lopez and Pablo Omenaca (both ex-StackAI), that calls itself "the Waymo of personalized demos." Its agent joins a live video call 24/7 and demos the real product on demand, using autonomous browser control to navigate your live software or a sandboxed copy while it talks. Demos launch from landing pages, from inside your app, or from links in outbound email, and transcripts, analysis, and next steps land directly in your CRM.

Karumi's defining trait is behaving like a self-serve product in a category that mostly refuses to. Its pricing page publishes a Self-Serve plan at $900/month — one AI agent, one language, three seats, the agent builder, CRM data export, and an MCP connection; earlier versions of the page also listed a 100-session monthly cap — with everything beyond that, extra languages included, in custom Enterprise territory. A "Launch Demo Now" button even drops you into Karumi demoing Karumi, which deserves credit: few rivals let the product speak for itself. Security is serious for a company this small — SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 alongside GDPR — and the site claims the "lowest latency in the market," a marketing line no public benchmark currently backs. Named customers include Salesforge, Re-Leased, and Clay, and an in-house research page with three published LLM papers adds unusual technical credibility.

How the demos actually run: a LiveBox VM vs live browser control

Both agents demo real software; where they run it differs, and the difference matters.

Sable wraps a functional copy of your product in a controlled virtual machine. The upside is stability and shared control — agent and customer can both act inside LiveBox, which suits Sable's longer arc of onboarding, certification, and training sessions. The trade-off is that the buyer watches a copy rather than the live application, and standing that environment up is part of a high-touch implementation Sable runs for you.

Karumi points its browser automation at the product itself, or a sandbox you designate, and meets the buyer on a plain video call. That is lighter to deploy and truer to the live product, at the cost of the environmental control a VM provides. Karumi adds sentiment analysis of prospect engagement, but neither vendor claims per-prospect memory across sessions — Sable's context graph learns at the organization level.

On conversation quality, neither vendor's claim is independently benchmarked. The single public Karumi review on G2 praises the instant, no-scheduling demo while noting the agent is "still improving when it comes to sounding completely natural in every context." Ask both vendors for a live session and judge with your own ears.

Opposite buying motions: a waitlist vs a price on the page

This is the real fork in the road.

Buying Sable is the enterprise motion at its most enterprise: a get-in-touch form, a waitlist the company says is 150+ companies long, a custom contract, and no published — or even credibly reported — price as of August 2026. Normal if your procurement team expects that dance; a dead end if you are budgeting this quarter.

Buying Karumi means clicking "Get Started" on a published $900/month plan. That transparency is genuinely rare here and worth applauding. The caveats: $900 is a flat monthly fee whether demos run or not, the entry plan speaks exactly one language, and the step above it is an unpriced Enterprise conversation — so the self-serve lane is real but narrow. Neither product offers a free trial.

A quick way to test any of these numbers against your own funnel is the ROI calculator we publish; it works for flat-fee plans as well as usage-based ones.

Proof: brand-name deployments vs an early public footprint

Sable's evidence is who runs it: Notion, Decagon, unnamed "large public companies," and $45M of conviction from two of the most selective firms in venture. All of it, though, reaches you through Sable's own PR and its investors — there is no G2, Capterra, or Product Hunt profile at all.

Karumi's evidence is small but public: a 4.5 on G2 from a single review as of August 2026, a 4.2 from three ratings on Techjockey, and named testimonials from Re-Leased, Salesforge, and Clay. Neither company yet gives a buyer much independent evidence; Karumi at least gives you some you can click.

When Sable is the right call, and when Karumi is

Choose Sable if you are an enterprise planning an agent across the whole customer lifecycle — demos today, onboarding, partner certification, and training tomorrow — if a deep compliance stack through ISO 42001 shortens your security review, and if being early to the best-funded platform in the category is worth a waitlist and a custom contract.

Choose Karumi if you want a live AI demo agent running this month at a known cost, your motion spans landing pages, in-app, and outbound email, one language is enough to start, and you would rather judge a young product by trying it than by reading press about it.

Either way, press the question neither vendor answers publicly today: what do sessions convert to, at what all-in cost.

The third option: engagement billing and a price list you can read now

Time for the clearly labeled sales pitch. Naoma is a full-cycle AI account executive for inbound: it opens with discovery, then gives a live demo adapted to the buyer — slides plus the real product driven live in a browser session, with branching journeys on higher plans — handles objections, qualifies, and ends in a booked meeting or a direct route to signup and checkout, with CRM write-back. It speaks 33 languages, auto-detected and switchable mid-demo, ships best-in-class realistic avatars, branded mascots, and animated avatars (with custom builds on request), added prospect memory and account enrichment in August 2026, and includes the high-converting website widget with a built-in chat bot on every plan. On latency, Naoma's in-house stack delivers roughly 20% faster conversational reaction than an ElevenLabs stack.

Against this pairing, Naoma's position is simple: Karumi's transparency, a lower entry, and a different meter. Pricing is published from $299/mo on the pricing page — the lowest published entry price in the demo-first segment — and billing is engagement-based: a demo becomes chargeable only after 3 minutes of real engagement, and bounces are free, where Karumi's $900 is flat. Proof is public too: Naoma has conducted more than 50,000 AI demos, and in the AiSDR case study, 53% of demos ran past 3 minutes, conversations averaged 7 minutes 50 seconds, 21% of demos produced a qualified lead, and 6% ended in a booked meeting, alongside a 4.9 on G2 and a 5.0 on Product Hunt. The honest gaps: Naoma is GDPR compliant with SOC 2 still in progress — the one axis where both Sable and Karumi are ahead today — and self-serve purchase with a free trial arrives in September 2026, so plans currently start with a quote request.

We will follow Karumi's lead on transparency and skip the video entirely. Talk to our agent right now, this is the actual product:

For the full head-to-heads, read Naoma vs Sable and Naoma vs Karumi; if Supersonik is also on your shortlist, Karumi vs Supersonik covers that pairing, and every matchup lives on the comparisons hub.

FAQ

Should I pick Sable or Karumi? Pick Sable for an enterprise-wide AI employee with elite references (Notion, Decagon), the deepest certification stack, and a high-touch build — if a waitlist and custom contract fit how you buy. Pick Karumi for a published $900/mo entry, self-serve purchase, and demos across landing pages, in-app, and outbound email.

Is there an alternative to both Sable and Karumi? Yes — Naoma, a live AI demo agent with published tiers from $299/mo, engagement-based billing, 33 languages, and public reviews; see Naoma vs Sable and Naoma vs Karumi for the detailed matchups.

Does Karumi publish pricing? Yes — a Self-Serve plan at $900/month (one agent, one language, three seats) on karumi.ai/pricing, with custom Enterprise above it; Sable publishes no pricing at all as of August 2026.

Do Sable and Karumi have public reviews? Sable has none anywhere as of August 2026; Karumi shows a 4.5 on G2 from one review plus a 4.2 from three Techjockey ratings, so evaluations of either still lean on pilots and reference calls.

How are Sable and Karumi funded? Sable announced $45M co-led by Sequoia Capital and 8VC in July 2026; Karumi has raised $500K from Y Combinator (Fall 2025 batch) as of August 2026.

Want the price, the billing meter, and the case numbers before any sales call? Get an AI demo now →