This Knoxville-based comapny is the ‘magnet for needles in the haystack’ for sales leads
Through its patented method for analyzing consumer, telecom, carrier, and professional data, founder Joey Gilkey said sales reps using TitanX talk to someone every four dials instead of every 40.
About two weeks ago, Teknovation shared news about TitanX’s $27 million Series A raise. Serial entrepreneur Joey Gilkey founded the company in 2024 and quickly gained traction after creating a new business category he coined “Phone Intent.”
The company’s goal is to help sales teams and phone representatives reach decision-makers faster. TitanX’s platform uses algorithms to identify which individuals inside a company are most likely to answer a cold call.
To better understand the business and its founding story, we sat down with Joey to learn how he built a multimillion-dollar company from his farm in Knoxville.
The problem: people don’t answer cold calls
Joey spent his entire career in sales, working everywhere from Fortune 100 companies to early-stage startups. Across the board, he said, nearly every sales organization relies on phone outreach, and nearly all face the same core challenge: getting someone to pick up.
Historically, companies tried to solve that by hiring more staff and pushing for more call volume. But those methods rarely improved quality.
Meanwhile, answer rates for both calls and emails have plummeted. AI-generated emails are often flagged as spam and deleted before they reach an inbox. Spam-blocking apps have made cold calls even harder.
“Maybe 10 years ago, you could make 10 dials and talk to one person, right? Today, you make, like, 30 to 50 dials to talk to one person,” Joey said.
He began looking for a better solution. In 2023, he acquired intellectual property for about one million dollars that would later become the backbone of TitanX. The technology helps identify who in a market is most likely to answer a cold call.
“I ended up rolling out our platform in June 2024, and we shot out like a cannon. I went from buying the intellectual property for $1 million to turning into a $100 million company two and a half years later,” Joey said.
The road to success came with risk
Joey has started five companies and considers three of them successful. All three were operating when he acquired the TitanX IP. But he believed in the technology so strongly that he made a bold decision.
“I put everything I had on this thing. My entire net worth got sunk into this business because I just believed in the vision. I had a couple of other businesses that were spinning off a ton of cash flow for me at the time, and I decided to shut them all down just to focus on this one thing,” Joey said.
He closed those other companies in 2025.
“It was just really betting on the vision,” he said. “And, it obviously paid off.”
Until the most recent $27 million Series A, the company was bootstrapped entirely by what he joked was the “Bank of Gilkey.” He managed that by applying what he described as the “$100 million lens.”
“I look at every decision through the lens of building a $100 million software company,” Joey said. He added that he protects his “yes” carefully, especially when it comes to hiring.
“Talent is everything. It’s better to hire the most qualified talent that can do the work of two or three people, versus several people who do less,” he said. “For example, I’m gonna go poach talent from a Fortune 1,000 company that’s getting paid $500,000 a year, and I’m gonna give them a piece of the pie. It’s worth sacrificing a portion of equity to get that talent.”
A magnet for the needles in the haystack
Joey said about 20 percent of any given market will answer the phone when the call comes from an unknown number. TitanX exists to find that group.
“You’re building a list of all your prospects. We call that the haystack. Then, you’re shipping that haystack to the sales floor to start dialing. Inside that haystack are the needles. The challenge is… there’s a lot of hay and very few needles. TitanX is the magnet that pulls those needles out,” he said.
Through its patented method for analyzing consumer, telecom, carrier, and professional data, Joey said sales reps using TitanX talk to someone every four dials instead of every 40.
Building it from Knoxville
“You don’t have to live in New York City, London, or San Francisco to be in tech,” he said. “Here, our operating costs are lower, and you can hire talent from anywhere in the world to work these days.”
Joey is currently the only TitanX employee based in East Tennessee.
“I believe that if you obsess about your customers and obsess about the problem you solve, you can build anywhere.”
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