Hassan Riggs knows the pain of cold calling.

As a former inside sales agent at a real estate brokerage, he made “tens of thousands” of cold calls to homeowners, trying to find some who might be looking to sell. “When you enter into this business, one of the dreams that you’re sold is that you can make money without having any money — all you need is a cellphone,” Riggs says. “Cold calling homeowners is the primary way most people get their business. The problem is, it’s really ineffective and inefficient.”

Riggs’ Birmingham-based tech startup, Smart Alto, looks to solve that problem. The company works as an aggregator of “people data and property data to let our users know everything about the homes in a neighborhood — the people who live there, deed and mortgage info, tax assessments, valuation, phone number, email, social profiles — and then we can use artificial intelligence to generate a highly accurate list of prospects whom (agents) should go after, i.e., who is most likely to sell their home in the next six months,” Riggs says. The company also uses predictive analytics to ease users through that first, potentially awkward, interaction — i.e., suggesting the most effective method of contact, or even providing specific wording.

Smart Alto was initially established in Silicon Valley, where Riggs participated in the Y Combinator startup accelerator program famous for launching tech giants like Airbnb, DoorDash and Twitch. That program encourages participants to set up headquarters in San Francisco — but Riggs, a Childersburg native, knew he wanted to put down his company’s roots back home in Alabama.

In particular, he was drawn to Birmingham’s burgeoning tech community, which includes hubs like startup incubator Innovation Depot and Bronze Valley, a nonprofit investment platform supporting tech founders from underrepresented communities.

“In order to be successful in a startup, you need content — that’s just knowledge of how to do something — you need mentorship and advisers, and you also need capital,” Riggs says. “Birmingham has provided the infrastructure for all these things.”

Since moving to Birmingham, the company has increased its workforce to 14 employees. “We’ve been growing pretty fast for the past couple of years, and I don’t see any of that slowing down,” Riggs says. “But I also believe what’s gotten us here isn’t going to take us there.”

Initially focused solely on the real estate market, the company has since adopted a more expansive, “industry-agnostic” approach, with an expanded focus on services for insurance agents and mortgage brokers. And the company’s AI and machine learning capabilities are growing, thanks in no small part to a $100,000 investment from Google last year, which includes hands-on support from the tech behemoth.

Riggs’ next goal is to shift into a product-led business model instead of a sales-led one — creating a user-first product so useful and effective that it spreads via word of mouth and allows Smart Alto to grow on its own, rather than having to sell directly to big-enterprise buyers. It’s a business strategy that, of course, does not require cold calls.

This story previously was published by This is Alabama. Want to read more good news about Alabama? Sign up for the This is Alabama newsletter here.