A Surrey-born founder is building what she believes is the next generation of sales software—one designed for Instagram, not inboxes.

Harpriya Bagri, a UBC-trained engineer and former machine learning engineer at LinkedIn, has launched Hotbox, an AI-powered platform that helps businesses identify and convert high-intent leads directly from their social media activity.

The startup was recently accepted into Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun accelerator—selecting fewer than 1% of applicants from roughly 19,000 companies—and is among a small group of Canadian companies in the current cohort.

Bagri says the idea behind Hotbox is rooted in a fundamental shift in how businesses are built.

“There’s a culture shift happening right now,” she explains. “Businesses today no longer start by creating a website or having an email address; they start with an Instagram account.”

That shift has created a gap.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen social commerce grow at an unprecedented rate, but the infrastructure hasn’t followed,” she says.

Hotbox is designed to fill that void. The platform analyzes activity across likes, comments, and direct messages, researches the profiles behind those interactions, and surfaces high-intent leads. It can then “agentically engage” with those prospects—bringing the structure of a traditional CRM into a social-first, algorithm-driven environment.

“These tools already exist for an email-based world,” Bagri says. “But they don’t exist for the algorithm one we’re shifting to.”

The idea was born from firsthand experience. While leading growth at Respell—since acquired by Salesforce—Bagri built viral AI content that drove significant inbound interest through her DMs.

“My DMs exploded, but not just with buyers,” she says. “Some messages were a single fire emoji… and just a few were serious leads worth six figures each, buried in the noise.”

Hotbox aims to surface those opportunities automatically, helping founders and businesses turn social engagement into structured pipeline.

Bagri’s background spans both deep technical research and growth execution. She previously built algorithms used at Canada’s national particle accelerator, TRIUMF, published AI research at NeurIPS, and earlier worked with MILA on research into social media behaviour.

Now a solo founder, she says Hotbox is just getting started.

“We’re the first to build sales tools for social media,” Bagri says.

The company is preparing for Speedrun Demo Day on April 14 as it continues building out its platform.