From "searching for keywords" to "finding people who can get things done": RightWho leverages AI to identify key business contacts.

The prototype of a product may be completed faster with the assistance of AI, but when it truly enters the market, the entrepreneurial team still has to face more specific problems: who is familiar with local customers and channels? Who has worked on similar projects? Who can participate in the next phase of business cooperation? Compared with generating content and code, finding people with real experience that match the current goals still requires a lot of retrieval and verification work.

RightWho, an AI-powered key person discovery and connection product, aims to turn this into a usable service: users describe their business goals in natural language, and the agent finds relevant professionals based on the description, presents the matching basis, and assists in subsequent follow-ups. The product was officially launched for trial operation in September 2026. On October 29, RightWho won the "AI Practice Excellence Award" at the "2026 Qianchao Cup Global Entrepreneurship Competition".

From "Searching by Keywords" to "Finding People Who Can Deliver Results"

For example, an industrial software company preparing to enter the UK market hopes to find people who are familiar with local manufacturing customers and have actually driven channel cooperation. The traditional approach is usually to first determine job title keywords, then search for candidates one by one on professional social platforms, corporate official websites and industry news, and then judge whether they truly have relevant experience. For small teams without full-time business development staff, this preliminary investigation can take up a lot of time.

RightWho calls its methodology "Goal-first", which means starting from "what business goal needs to be achieved" instead of directly searching by job title, company name or keywords. It first understands what the user wants to accomplish, then looks at what ability traces and proofs the people who can accomplish this matter have left in the digital world, and then cross-compares across sources to find candidates. Whether a person works at a certain company is only a clue; whether he has participated in similar projects, what responsibilities he has taken on, and what verifiable results he has achieved are the more valuable matching bases.

Integrate Discovery, Verification and Connection into a Single Workflow

In RightWho's product design, the search result is not the end of the process. Centered on the goals entered by users, the AI agent completes demand analysis, clue retrieval, candidate evaluation and result summary. Users can view the relevant background and matching reasons of the candidates, and then decide whether to make further contact. The next step after finding the key person is how to impress them. Many people have stumbled here: Nordic talents do not reply in summer, asking Germans to work overtime, and writing long speeches to South American partners. To impress the key people you need the most in the most appropriate way, we have integrated the crowd characteristics, channel platforms, demand classification and pit avoidance guidelines accumulated in the past few years into the personalized invitation workflow. We found that the invitations polished by RightWho can achieve a 48-55% response rate on LinkedIn cold outreach messages, while the cold outreach response rate on LinkedIn is 4%-15%. Today, on RightWho, we have turned this capability that used to require high fees into a workable AI workflow.

This design also extends to the connection phase. The Smart Pitch function in the product can generate targeted initial contact content by combining business goals and the public experience of the candidates, reducing the repeated switching operations for users between searching, sorting out backgrounds and writing outreach messages. What RightWho hopes to provide is not a one-time static contact list, but a continuous workflow from raising demands to discovering targets, verifying bases and preparing for engagement.

First Serve Frequent Talent Seekers, Then Expand to Cross-Border Professional Collaboration

RightWho chooses to cut in from professional users with high-frequency talent-seeking demands and easily verifiable effects, namely professional consultants, OPCs and small team entrepreneurs. Such users often need to discover key people outside their existing contact lists, need to find early customers, industry experts and channel partners. Discovering and connecting these people directly determines the business results of users.

In terms of business model, RightWho adopts a combination of free experience and paid subscription. Users use functions such as AI search, candidate information expansion and email outreach by points. Compared with simply selling contact data, the team hopes to establish paid value with a set of reusable task processes. The overseas market takes standardized, self-service products as the main direction, while the project experience of large domestic enterprises provides the foundation for the team to understand complex organizational scenarios and system integration requirements.

Data released by the U.S. Small Business Administration in 2026 shows that there are approximately 36.21 million small businesses in the United States. Although this figure cannot be directly equated with RightWho's payable market, the huge number of small professional service teams and growing enterprises provides potential application space for cross-organization and cross-region talent and partner discovery tools. At this stage, RightWho pays more attention to whether it can establish the habit of continuous use and payment in specific high-frequency scenarios.

Luyi Wang, the founder and CEO of RightWho, completed his undergraduate and master's studies at the University of Notre Dame in the United States, and has previously worked at PwC in both China and the United States. He has long been engaged in work related to talent digitalization, search recommendation and enterprise recruitment systems, and has participated in enterprise projects of BOE, Wanda, CIIC, FESCO Adecco and other enterprises. The team has experience in back-end, front-end, testing and related technical delivery, and has accumulated a number of authorized invention patents in previous R&D of intelligent recruitment technology.

In the view of the founding team, AI is lowering the execution threshold of many digital tasks, but commercial activities ultimately cannot be separated from the real collaboration between people. What RightWho hopes to do is to make finding the right people no longer completely dependent on existing connections, scattered searches and manual research, so that professional capabilities around the world can be more easily discovered and connected.

Let every idea meet the right person.