People.ai – Predictive Sales Platform Raises $7M in Series A

Recently added to our portfolio of startups, People.ai, an AI-powered platform that collects data from all types of sales activities, analyzes that data and predicts sales opportunities for salespersons to quickly close deals has raised $7M in Series A.

The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (and one of their partners, Nakul Nandan is also joining People.ai as a new board member) in participation with SV Angel, Shasta Ventures, Index Ventures and Y Combinator.

The solution 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 spent in 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 is the backbone that reads all types of sales activity.

Rogynskyy tells me that recently, the company is seeing 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.

Please read full story at TechCrunch.