Founded in 2016, People.ai, our portfolio startup that aims to boost revenues of enterprises by automating their sales operations and providing actionable insights with the help of their AI algorithms has raised $60M in Series C at the valuation of almost $500M.
The funding round was led by ICONIQ Capital with help from Andreessen Horowitz, GGV Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Frontline Ventures and Y Combinator. Moreover, ICONIQ Capital partner, Will Griffith and Andreessen Horowitz’s partner, Peter Levine will join People.ai as new board members.
Here is the quick financial timeline of People.ai:
- 2016 – Seed round
- 2017 – Series A ($7M)
- 2018 – Series B ($30M)
- 2019 – Now ($60M)
Including this Series C, the total funding amount of People.ai now stands at $100M.
“Some people say it’s what LinkedIn should have been,” Oleg Rogynskyy, People.ai’s founder and CEO, said in an interview. It helps, he said with a little laugh, that People.ai had managed to recruit David Flink to lead up product management at the startup. Flink joined earlier this year, having worked for nearly three years at LinkedIn on areas like search and discovery.
The startup is not disclosing its valuation, but sources tell us it is around $500 million — specifically in the “mid-nine-figures.” The big number is partly the result of the startup’s strong growth so far: It has already ingested 350 million sales activities, 40 million contacts, a sales pipeline of $300 billion and $100 billion in closed and won deals. Its revenues have been growing 5X year-over-year, with customers squarely so far in the tech camp that surrounds the San Francisco-based startup. They include Red Hat, Lyft, Zoom, New Relic and Splunk.
People.ai’s approach, says Rogynskyy, is not to replace salespeople but to “supercharge” the teams by using AI to ingest “high-value, low-volume activity.” Sitting in the background, requiring no active input from the user, it picks up all the “exhaust” produced in the process of a day, and uses it to produce cheat sheets to salespeople so that they can use them when speaking to clients to help them close deals, providing interesting insights, relevant facts and other details.
Rogynskyy points out that his company currently has more than 65 patents (secured and in progress) on intelligent matching, and the plan longer term will be to take the sales model and apply it to a wider range of industry verticals. These are likely to include areas like real estate, financial services and recruitment (areas where the product is already being used in smaller use cases, he noted).
“This model is applicable to any area where you are building external, complex relationships at scale,” he said.
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