How Valhalla's AICO Generated 1,000+ Booked Appointments for M&A Clients Using Smartlead | Smartlead Case Study

How Valhalla's AICO Generated 1,000+ Booked Appointments for M&A Clients Using Smartlead

AICO is a leading-edge service specialising in lead generation and appointment setting, powered by proprietary AI technology. The clients it serves operate in one of the most demanding, relationship-driven verticals in enterprise B2B: mergers and acquisitions.

Investment bankers, business brokers, and private equity firms rely on AICO to reach the people who are hardest to find through any other channel. CEOs, founders, and business owners actively or prospectively considering selling their company.

These are not prospects who respond to generic outreach. They have to be identified through precise signal, approached at the right moment, and given a compelling reason to take a call. In the last year alone, AICO generated over 1,000 booked appointments for its clients. Not positive replies. Not open rates. Qualified calls with business owners and decision-makers at companies being evaluated for acquisition or investment. Smartlead has been the infrastructure layer underneath all of it for the past two years.

Who Is Behind Valhalla and AICO?

Garik Tate is an AI Futurist, international keynote speaker, investor, and expert in AI and systems intelligence. He is the CEO and co-founder of Valhalla.team, the AI-native venture studio that built AICO as one of its core services.

Valhalla does not build traditional agencies running templates and hoping for replies. It builds systems-first operations powered by proprietary AI technology, treating commercial outcomes as engineered results rather than activities. The infrastructure AICO runs today reflects twelve years of cold email experience across multiple ventures, including a publishing company, a software development firm, and a virtual assistant agency. Every one of those businesses was built on the back of cold outreach.

Cold email has been the consistent thread across all of it. During COVID, the team experimented with warm networking and relationship-led approaches. They came back to cold email. The reason was direct.

"Cold email is just like the turn on the tap method. The fact that you just can really control how many sales calls you take and how many you convert with just cold email, it is really hard to beat."

How AICO Built on Smartlead?

AICO switched to Smartlead from Lemlist when the team needed a scale path that Lemlist could not provide. The initial switch had an ironic origin. Older Smartlead content still circulating at the time suggested LinkedIn functionality that had already been deprecated. The team joined expecting an all-in-one platform.

By the time they discovered the LinkedIn feature was gone, the email infrastructure was already proving itself. LinkedIn had become secondary to the core operation. Smartlead stayed. Two years later, AICO has not moved. The reason is not inertia. It is the API.

"The reason why we have stayed, which I think is a little more compelling, is that Smartlead's API is very, very strong. It is not a bug-free platform. There are still some bugs that pop through. But you guys take such good care of it, always being on the cutting edge, and just being very API-driven. That has worked really well for our automations and our own ways of doing things."

For a team with its own software development capability, API quality is not a secondary consideration. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.

The Market AICO Serves

AICO operates almost exclusively in the M&A vertical. Investment bankers, business brokers, and private equity firms need to reach business owners who are not advertising their openness to a transaction. They have to be found through outbound, approached with specificity, and given a reason to engage.

That makes this one of the hardest cold email contexts in enterprise B2B. The message cannot be generic. The targeting has to be built on real signal. And the conversion metric that matters is not a reply or an open.

"We do not measure ourselves based on positive responses. It is actually on the booked calls. Last year we got over a thousand appointments set for our clients, all with business owners primarily looking to sell their company, all with CEOs, owners, founders."

That is the standard AICO holds itself to. Everything before the booked call is infrastructure cost.

Key Challenges AICO Solved With Smartlead

Building a Proprietary Analytics Layer on Top of Send Data

AICO does not rely on Smartlead's native reporting to understand what is working. The team exports every outbound email as a structured record via Smartlead's API and loads it into their own database. Custom queries run across mailbox performance, campaign performance, and copy performance independently, at whatever granularity the team needs.

Understanding cold email deliverability at that level of granularity is what separates a high-performing M&A outreach programme from one that produces volume without qualified pipeline.

"We download all of our send records. Every single email that we send out from Smartlead, we take all that and we put it into a database to run our own queries off of. So we see which mailboxes are doing the best, which campaigns are doing the best, which email copies are doing the best. We get all that data together."

Prioritising M&A Leads at Scale Across a High-Volume Reply Database

When outbound runs at the volume AICO operates, the reply database becomes a management challenge as much as a data problem. In the M&A context, a business owner who replies to a cold email is at peak interest at that moment. Every hour that passes without a qualified response reduces the probability of a booked call.

AICO built its own internal lead prioritisation dashboard entirely on top of Smartlead's Reply Database API. Inbox managers work from a custom interface that ranks and surfaces leads by priority rather than working directly inside Smartlead's UI. The system exists because Smartlead exposes a reply database API reliable enough to build production tooling on.

"We use the Reply Database API really heavily to power our own dashboard so that our inbox managers can rank and prioritise leads really, really effectively."

Automating Bounce and Reply Handling in Real Time

At high send volumes in a vertical like M&A, manual bounce and reply processing is both operationally expensive and deliverability dangerous. Every unprocessed bounce is a signal risk to email providers. Every delayed reply follow-up is a warm conversation cooling off.

AICO relies on Smartlead's webhook infrastructure to handle both automatically. Every bounce and every reply triggers a webhook that feeds directly into AICO's internal systems the moment it fires.

"Every time an email bounces or replies, it automatically ends up in our system so that we can take that data right away. Webhooks, reply database, send records. Those are the three functionalities that have worked out really, really well for us."

Scaling Infrastructure Without Proportional Overhead

Before Smartlead, growing a cold email operation meant manually configuring mailboxes, building campaigns by hand, and managing send schedules individually. The operational cost of scaling was proportional to the volume added. Smartlead changed that relationship entirely.

"So much before was really manual. Having to set up campaigns, set up mailboxes ourselves, and then manually sending emails, it was a pain. Smartlead makes it really easy to just scale to the moon pretty effortlessly. The ease of scale is probably the number one difference compared to our previous systems."

The pricing shift from contacts to sends removed the last friction point. The full AICO database sits inside the platform without penalty, and the team can scale to new client volumes without treating growth as an operational project.

Campaign Results: 1,000+ Booked Appointments in One Year

AICO does not measure itself on reply rates or lead volume. It measures on booked appointments only. In the last year, AICO set over 1,000 of those appointments for M&A clients. All through cold email, all running on Smartlead.

The targeting strategy that produces those results has evolved over two years on the platform. Early campaigns relied on AI-generated intro lines summarising a prospect's business. Lightweight personalisation that performed well initially. Across the board however the signal has weakened as it became widespread.

"We are getting a lot more clever with how we set up the opening lines. More about activity like they posted on LinkedIn, has their company posted anything, have they hired anybody recently. We are focusing a lot more on that kind of material for the intro lines rather than just the bog standard, I saw you do XYZ and it is amazing."

Data sourcing comes primarily from Prospeo, Apollo, and ListKit for intent data, with some direct streaming from LinkedIn. The team is currently testing follower scraping from specific LinkedIn brand pages using Leads Forge as an additional signal layer. The direction across all of it is consistent: sharper signal, more behavioural, less generic.

How Smartlead Solved AICO's Challenges

An API Built for Teams That Want to Build On It

The depth of AICO's API usage is unusual even among technically sophisticated agencies. Custom send record exports feeding a proprietary analytics database. A custom reply prioritisation dashboard built on the Reply Database API. Automated webhook-driven processing for bounces and replies. API-driven mailbox provisioning via SmartSenders currently in development.

The entire infrastructure layer underneath AICO's client delivery model is built on Smartlead's API surface.

"SmartDelivery, SmartSenders, and SmartInfra are all things that Smartlead either pioneered or was very close to follow in that cold email space. So I kind of just know that whatever is the tools out there being used on the cutting edge, Smartlead will end up with as well."

Webhook Infrastructure That Production Systems Can Depend On

Garik notes that earlier versions of Smartlead's webhook functionality had occasional timing issues. Those have been resolved. Current webhook performance is reliable enough that AICO has built production systems around it, treating webhooks as a core dependency rather than a best-effort feature.

SmartSenders Ordering That Works at Scale

The improvement to SmartSenders mailbox ordering is called out by Garik as a meaningful operational upgrade. Earlier versions had friction in the purchasing flow. The addition of purchase history and a more structured ordering process resolved those issues.

"Previously I had a lot of issues with SmartSenders and how buying mailboxes worked. But since you guys rolled out the big improvement with purchase history and all that, that has been a huge boom. Really, really good. The ordering of SmartSenders mailboxes has improved a lot, which I have been really happy with."

Support and Account Management That Actually Solves Problems

Garik's view of Smartlead's support is nuanced and direct. Response times have slowed as the platform has scaled. But the quality of resolution, when contact is made, has remained high.

"When I am in contact with support, they have truly put in the effort to understand the problem and to actually be empowered to solve it. Anytime something can be done, support has always been really, really well empowered to actually solve the problem, even weird things."

The account management relationship is cited alongside the product as a reason AICO has stayed on the platform.

"I sometimes contact Vijay if I have questions or comments, and he is always willing to hop on a quick call. I think that makes me feel like I have a good account manager that I can talk to if things are not making sense, which is really, really huge."

Content and Community That Operates at Practitioner Level

"I think your guys' content is better than the other platforms. Interviewing real experts. Particularly the office hours has been tremendous."

Notable Achievements

M&A Appointment Engine · Full Year Results

Top Smartlead Features Driving Results

  1. API and Send Records. The foundation of AICO's proprietary analytics infrastructure. Every outbound email is exported as a structured record and loaded into AICO's own database for custom performance queries across mailboxes, campaigns, and copy.

  2. Reply Database API. Powers AICO's internal lead prioritisation dashboard. Inbox managers work from a custom interface that ranks inbound replies by priority, ensuring the highest-value M&A leads are actioned first.

  3. Webhooks. Real-time processing of bounces and replies into AICO's internal systems. Every deliverability signal and every inbound reply is handled automatically the moment it fires.

  4. SmartSenders. Infrastructure provisioning for sending mailboxes at scale. The improvement to SmartSenders ordering has made it significantly faster to add sending capacity without operational friction.

  5. SmartDelivery. Inbox placement monitoring at the technical frontier of deliverability. In an M&A outreach context where every contact is a senior executive at a private company, primary inbox placement is not optional.

  6. Ease of Scale. The structural reason AICO stayed with Smartlead after migrating from Lemlist. Adding mailboxes, adding leads, and expanding campaigns is fast and does not require proportional operational overhead.