Chinese startups are selling exporters AI salespeople that prospect for buyers abroad

Two Chinese startups have raised money to sell exporters a software “salesperson”. The idea is the same: the company says what it sells and where it wants to sell it, and an AI agent looks for buyers, writes the messages, follows up on replies and hands the team only the contacts with real interest. For anyone buying from China, this means some of the pitches arriving by email are already written and sent by machines.

Shanghai-based Baixyn (百型智能) raised a Pre-A round of tens of millions of yuan in September 2025, led by GSR Ventures (金沙江创投), with 源数创投 taking part, according to 36Kr. Its AI “foreign-trade employees” are called Zoe, David and Lisa. According to the company, clients enter a budget and target market, and the agent handles market analysis, customer search, outreach and follow-up, delivering qualified requests for quotation. The company told 36Kr about an industrial air-purifier maker that spent less than 60,000 yuan and closed 12 million yuan in orders.

Founder and CEO Han Mei (韩美) headed the foreign-card business in Alipay’s international division and co-founded Chinese mobility platform Hellobike (哈啰出行), where she was chief operating officer. In an interview published in April by TMTPost, she said the company was founded in 2024 and that its agents have contacted more than 5 million purchasing decision-makers in more than 160 countries and received hundreds of thousands of requests for quotation. The figures are the company’s.

iSales (光年触达) was founded in April 2025 and launched its sales agent in June. In March 2026 it announced a US$1 million angel round from Impa Ventures, according to the 21st Century Business Herald. The company says monthly revenue passed 1 million yuan six months after launch and reached 2 million in January 2026, and it projects 50 million for the year. Clients pay for what the agent does, such as the number of leads found and personalised messages sent. Founder and CEO Pan Yiming (潘一鸣) graduated in industrial engineering from Tsinghua University in 2015 and helped develop Didi’s ride-dispatch system and ByteDance’s automated ad-delivery system. He says the product works best for sectors such as industrial parts, where some Chinese makers may deliver, in his words, 90% of the performance of German or Japanese rivals at a third of the cost.

Automation has also reached the buying side. In September 2026 TMTPost reported exclusively that, according to Yilong (一隆), head of user-facing AI business at 1688, Alibaba’s wholesale site, more than 30% of transaction value on the platform already comes from purchasing flows automated through APIs, MCP or agent-to-agent protocols. 1688’s general manager for merchant development, Wang Qiang (王强), said he expects cross-border business to overtake domestic business in a little over two years; the piece itself notes it is still an order of magnitude smaller today. From January to November 2025, 1688’s registered cross-border buyers exceeded 5.94 million, up 76% year on year, and bought close to 200 billion yuan of goods.

AI is also moving into other steps. Shanghai’s TRANS·MISSION sells factories a sales agent that writes in more than 40 languages, and Haizol uses AI agents to quote custom parts; CSP has profiled both.

CSP take: for Brazilian importers, the change is practical. Well-written messages, in Portuguese and during São Paulo business hours, become cheap for any factory, serious or not. Verification matters more than first impressions: business licence, a video call from the factory, a sample and a bank account in the company’s name. This reading is ours, not the companies’.