Joey Gilkey is founder and CEO of TitanX, a Knoxville, Tennessee company that sells phone intent and dialing software to mid-market and enterprise B2B sales teams. He ran a sales services company, Apex Revenue, bought Phone Ready Leads in 2023 as a moat, then shut the services business down to build on that software.
TitanX launched in June 2024, finished 2024 at $1.4 million, and ended 2025 around $8.8 million. Its platform predicts who will answer the phone before a rep dials, lifting connect rates to about 25 percent versus the typical three to six percent. Today it is in the low eight figures with 39 full-time employees.
Joey is human-first on AI. TitanX uses AI in the back of the house to predict who will answer the phone, so reps make fifty focused calls instead of three hundred blind dials, but a person still has the conversation. He says AI SDRs and automated outreach erode the trust that high-stakes sales depend on.
In January 2026, Joey closed $28 million in growth equity from Updata Partners, paid out a large secondary, and bought dialer company FrontSpin the next day. TitanX launched its unified platform in October 2026. Joey also explains why he turned down every VC and the three rules he set for investors before signing.
Key Takeaways
- Back-Office AI: Use AI for hygiene, routing logic, and finding signals- the work that was slow, manual, or expensive.
- Phone Intent: Predicting who will answer before dialing lifts connect rates from about 5% to 25%.
- Precision Over Volume: Fifty targeted calls can produce more conversations than three hundred blind dials, at far lower cost.
- Live Conversations: A phone call is the one channel where you can ask, listen, and learn in real time.
- Invest In People: Cutting corners on key talent costs more than paying the right person up front.
Quote from Joey Gilkey, Founder and CEO of TitanX
“The people mucking this up think AI belongs at the front of the house in sales. We use a lot of AI ourselves, but think about a restaurant in San Diego my wife and I love, called Born and Raised, where the service is 10 out of 10, and we pay four or five hundred bucks for the night. If you told me agents or robots prepared that steak in the back, I wouldn’t care, as long as the front of the house stayed the same.
“It’s the relationship, the trust, the human-to-human interaction. If they put iPads at the table and I ordered from an iPad and it came a little faster, I’d never come back, and I look at anything that touches the customer the same way, especially in a sales-led motion with high ACVs. If we remove the human from the front of house, I think we’ll be drastically underwhelmed with the outcomes.
“The market is too optimistic that AI will replace sellers, and the whole AI SDR thing has really fallen flat. Where the market is really mucking it up is shoving AI in front to send the emails, send the LinkedIn, and take over the account executive’s selling process. AI does have a massive implication in the back of the house, removing the human work that was slow, manual, or expensive: the hygiene, the logic and the routing, and finding signals.”
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