Salesken, an artificial intelligence startup, has secured $22 million in a Series B funding round backed by Microsoft’s Venture Fund M12. The round of funding also featured participation from existing investor Sequoia India.
Salesken plans to use the fresh capital to speed up its operations in the North American market and to invest heavily in its proprietary deep tech solutions. Abhi Kumar, M12 partner, will join as a new member of Salesken’s board of directors as a result of this fundraising.
The company claims to offer conversational support to sales representatives based on a behavioral and data-science-driven model. The solution gives insight on several factors, including sales pitches, lead qualifications, and handling pricing discussion among many others.
The Bengaluru-based startup, founded in 2020 by Sreeraman Vaidyanathan and Surga Thilakan, delivers an AI-driven in-call live sales intelligence platform that increases revenue per representative by accumulating insights on inefficiencies in customers’ sales calls and facilitating sales representatives in bridging gaps with real-time inputs.
Surga Thilakan, co-founder and CEO of Salesken, stated that the startup aims to grow its 125-personnel team to 250 over the next year (March 2022), with improved hiring across technology, data science, and partially hiring in the US for sales and marketing expansion.
Conversation AI (artificial intelligence) technologies that provide visibility and analytics to sales executives have become a must-have in the sales stack as remote selling becomes more widespread across sectors. She also noted, “Salesken is addressing a fundamental requirement in the future of making insights actionable with sales reps, resulting in increased rep productivity.”
Surga claims that Covid has introduced remote selling practices to other more traditional businesses that were originally handled through outside sales. She went on to say that inside sales is now a reality and will be around for a long time as organizations recognize the efficiency and cost savings of selling remotely using cloud telephony and video conferencing.
Salesken claims that its platform reduces onboarding time by 2-3 months by providing live assistance to sales reps from day one. The Bengaluru-based startup further claims to enhance the top-line of organizations by 20-25 percent after a few months of adoption and has grown more than 300 percent in the last year.
The global sales intelligence industry was valued at $2 billion in 2019 and is expected to climb to $3.4 billion by 2024, at a CAGR of 11.4 percent. This increase is likely to be driven by the momentary demand for advanced software to improve consumer targeting and connect rates, as well as the rising demand for data enrichment software to optimize sales conversions.
