We’re back with a new episode of The Samaipata Podcast, where we sit down with top founders to unpack the strategies, decisions, and principles behind building and scaling high-growth startups.
In this episode, we sit down with Pablo Palafox, cofounder and CEO of HappyRobot, one of the fastest-growing enterprise AI companies in Silicon Valley. From almost finishing a PhD in computer vision to building a platform that powers over 100K daily calls for top US supply chain companies, Pablo’s story is a whirlwind of pivots, pressure, and execution.
We trace the origins of HappyRobot - how Pablo, his brother Javi Palafox, and their longtime friend Luis Paruup got into YC with a different idea entirely, only to pivot during Demo Day into a voice AI agent for logistics. What followed was what Pablo calls “pivot hell”. But the pain paid off. They landed their first client in April 2024 and have not looked back since.
By September 2024, they had crossed a $350K revenue run rate. By December, they had scaled to $2M ARR. Today, they are nearing 8 figures and powering communication workflows for 8 of the top 10 US freight brokers and other supply chain clients. All in under 18 months.
We talk through the evolution of the product - from a standalone voice agent to a full-stack orchestration platform handling end-to-end communication workflows across voice, email, and chat. Pablo walks us through the infrastructure that enables this scale: a proprietary tech stack, cloud-native deployment, and a robust AI auditing layer that catches failures before users do.
We also dig into their go-to-market motion, which - far from self-serve - leans heavily on Forward Deployment Engineers. These are not just onboarding specialists. They are AI implementation partners embedded within client ops teams to get the AI workforce up and running. It’s a deliberate, high-touch strategy tailored to fragmented industries like logistics, where one-size-fits-all automation simply does not work.
But none of this growth came easy. Pablo shares what it means to be “ready to explode”—technically, organizationally, and emotionally. When a client decides overnight to flip the switch and send 15,000 calls a day, your platform has to be ready. Or you risk dying from your own success.
We also explore how HappyRobot raised $15.6M from a16z with barely any revenue on the board—and how they just closed a $44M Series B led by Base10. Pablo opens up about the tradeoffs of raising fast and big, how to manage expectations with investors, and why they’ve kept burn low despite the capital.
On the cultural side, we talk about what it means to build from San Francisco with a Spanish soul—and how their values of extreme ownership, craftsmanship, and just being “majos” shape hiring and company building. From Guadalajara to California, the team now spans 50+ people (soon to be 100), many of them Spanish.
This is a great conversation with a founder building at hyperspeed while keeping both feet firmly on the ground.
Note: The Podcast is in Spanish
Listen to the episode here:
Join us each month for fresh perspectives from some of the most exciting founders in the Spanish startup ecosystem. We look forward to having you along for the ride!