This article was first published in VentureBeat by Bérénice Magistretti.
People.ai, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to better predict sales and marketing productivity, today announced funding of $7 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Index Ventures and Shasta Ventures joined, as well as existing investors Y Combinator and SV Angel.
People.ai connects via APIs to apps that include email, calendar, phone, DocuSign, GoToMeeting, and more, in order to gather data and analyze sales behavior.
“By leveraging artificial intelligence, we instantly provide full historical analysis of your sales team’s data, helping you understand which behaviors led to desired outcomes,” wrote People.ai CEO Oleg Rogynskyy, in an email to VentureBeat. “We also identify potential problems well ahead of revenue impact and immediately save reps 30 to 45 percent of their time by completely automating the need for manual data entry.”
People.ai’s subscription model is offered per seat — pricing varies based on the number of seats purchased. “Recently, we’ve been focusing on large enterprise deals with significant base and analytics components, combined with per-seat pricing, training, deployment, and other enterprise necessities,” wrote Rogynskyy. The chief executive says the company has more than 50 customers, including Gainsight, SalesLoft, and MemSQL.Other startups hovering in the predictive sales sector include Clari, Datahug, and InsightSquared. One of the more established companies is Inside Sales, which recently raised $50 million and is a favored contender for an initial public offering (IPO) this year.
Before joining Y Combinator’s summer 2016 batch and founding People.ai that same year, Rogynskyy founded and sold Semantria to Lexalytics in 2014.
People.ai will use today’s fresh injection of capital to hire engineers and invest in enterprise infrastructure, according to Rogynskyy. This includes boosting SOC2 security certification, enterprise deployment, onboarding, and more.
Based in San Francisco, People.ai currently has 25 employees.