People.ai raises $7M to automate sales ops for the enterprise … – TechCrunch

People.aiis a startup usingAI to give sales managers a predictive playbook forthe best way to close a deal. The company is announcing it has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Index Ventures and Shasta Ventures also participated in the round, alongside existing investors Y Combinator and SV Angel. Nakul Mandan, partner at Lightspeed,is also joining People.ais board of directors.

The problem the sales management platformis trying to solve is that managers coach teams based on intuition rather than data. People.ai wants to change this by providing a holistic view of every outreach and action reps take to close deals. The softwarelets yousee where in the pipeline sales repsare spending the most timeand identify the metrics tied to success. Work smarter, not harder, right?

The goal is to have full visibility intosalespeoples processeswith a visualization that showsmuch time top performers are spending at each phase of a deal, and where struggling reps may bedeviating from typically successful methodology. Are salespeople too zoned in on one phase of a deal? Not spending enough time talking to product managers, executives or other decision makers? Are they even focusingon the right leads? Those are the questions People.ais algorithms seek to answer.

Thesolution tracks activity across different communication touch points between salespeople and clients. The tech scans email, phone calls, calendar meetings and produces a dashboard showing how much time is spentin each phase of a deal, who was contacted and what the outcome was.

When People.ai launched last year, CEO and machine learning veteran Oleg Rogynskyy wanted to build an AI that would help automate sales ops as a function. Since then, the company realized they wanted to refocus on solving this same problem but with an eye on the enterprise.

There are many companies building out features related to conversational AI like Chorus.ai and VoiceOps. People.ai sees these companies as data sources, but that their own solution isthe backbone that readsall types of sales activity.

Rogynskyy tells me that recently, the company isseeing strong interest coming from the enterprise and Fortune 500 companies. People.ai will use the funding to scale out its product and sales teams, and engage in more enterprise-focused R&D.

Original post:

People.ai raises $7M to automate sales ops for the enterprise ... - TechCrunch