Every business development team we talk to is fighting the same fight: more inbound briefs than the team can possibly respond to well, a pipeline where the biggest deals are won or lost on the quality of the proposal, and a room of senior people burning evenings stitching together passages from past wins. It's the work that makes BD margin — and almost nobody enjoys doing it at 11pm.
Craxy AI is the product we built to change that — a proposal copilot purpose-built for BD teams that turns the deals you've already won into a first-draft response in minutes. Craxy hit the ProductHunt front page this week, and we wanted to share what's actually under the hood.
The BD bottleneck isn't writing — it's retrieval
Most "AI proposal writer" products that appeared in 2023 were thin wrappers over a generic LLM. They'd produce fluent prose that had nothing to do with your firm, your voice, or your past wins. BD leaders saw through it in a demo: the output was plausible but wrong in the specifics, and specifics are what buyers read.
When we sat down with BD teams we realised the bottleneck was earlier in the pipeline. The expensive part of responding to a brief isn't the writing. It's retrieving the three past deals that most resemble the new opportunity, the one reference logo that matters to this buyer, the two customer quotes that survived legal review. Generation takes minutes. Retrieval eats the week.
How Craxy actually works
Every Craxy tenant loads their own BD library — past proposals, closed-won case studies, reference decks, pricing models, discovery call notes. We chunk and embed everything into a per-tenant vector index, tagged with the metadata your team already tracks (industry, deal size, buyer persona, product line). When a new brief or RFP lands, Craxy extracts the structural signals, retrieves the most relevant passages from your own wins, and generates a first-draft proposal that cites where each section came from.
The result is not generic LLM prose. It's your firm's own voice, stitched from your real deals. The BD lead opens the draft and they recognise the sentences — because their team wrote them, two quarters ago, for a similar buyer.
Evaluation is not optional
The hard part of shipping AI products is not the model — it's making sure it doesn't get worse when you change something. Every prompt, every chunking strategy, every retrieval reranker change goes through an evaluation harness before it ships. We track precision on retrieval, factual grounding on generation, and a handful of tenant-specific voice checks that catch drift early.
We also built a guardrail layer that flags anything Craxy says it can't source — so the draft comes back with yellow highlights on every claim the BD lead needs to verify before sending. No hallucinated statistics, no fabricated logos, no made-up quotes.
Real results from early BD teams
The BD teams who've been running Craxy through beta tell us the same story: proposals that used to take three person-days now take an afternoon. Response rate on inbound briefs climbs because the team can actually reply to everything in the queue. The drafts still need senior judgement — they always will — but the blank-page problem is gone. That shift lets senior BD people spend their time on the shaping, the pricing call, and the buyer conversation, not the stitching.
What's next
Craxy is live and onboarding new BD teams. We're working next on the parts of the workflow that happen outside the proposal doc — RFP parsing, compliance matrices, a CRM-aware scoring view that lets leadership see which opportunities are most likely to convert, and handoff templates for when the deal moves to delivery. If you lead a BD team and this sounds like the tool you wish you had, reach out — we'd love to show you a live demo against your own win library.
