“Through Needle, 155 senior leaders connected with our three founders in two weeks.”
Leon Iwanowitsch
Co-Founder at Ontora
29.5%
Accepted a cold connection request with no note
155
C-level and transformation leaders connected in 14 sending days
3
Founder accounts run from one in-house console
72,000
API calls from their console in 18 days
6
AI clients connected to Needle over MCP
The problem
Ontora is a YC startup with about seven people. Its AI agents interview every employee in a company to map how work really gets done, and then Ontora builds the AI that fits. It sells to companies with 300 to 3,000 people, to consultancies and to private equity firms. All three founders sell, each from their own LinkedIn account. After YC, their inboxes filled up with pitches from agencies, recruiters and investors, and real buyer conversations got lost. Their target accounts lived in one shared lead sheet, and there was no simple way to work it from three accounts at once.
What they did with Needle
Ontora connected all three founder accounts in its first week and rarely opened the Needle app. The team runs it from agents. David Korn pushed about 40 leads a day from the lead sheet into a connect-only campaign from Cursor over MCP: a connection request with no note, sent to CEOs, COOs, heads of transformation and private equity operating partners. Leon Iwanowitsch let an agent clear his inbox through Needle: 64 messages in one hour, politely declining vendor pitches, turning seven of them into partner pitches and sending short openers to new connections. Then Leon built an in-house console on Needle’s API and n8n. It runs around the clock across all three accounts. Every five minutes it checks each account’s health and daily limits, every 30 minutes it pulls in new events, threads and profiles, and it sends connection requests from a queue after a do-not-contact check. Every contact Needle touches also lands in Attio, with its full LinkedIn state and whether a reply is waiting on the team.
The result
In 14 sending days, 155 of 526 cold connection requests were accepted (29.5%), all sent without a note. 97 of the new connections are C-level executives or founders, and half of them accepted within ten hours. The three founders now share one view of their LinkedIn, with every contact mirrored in their CRM. The first pipeline is showing up: a lead from their sheet, invited and messaged through Needle, booked a discovery call and brought a colleague along.
