Singapore-based AI sales assistant startup, Saleswhale, has just closed its Series A funding round with US$5.3 million raised.
Led by Monk’s Hill Ventures, this round brings back investors who previously participated in Saleswhale’s seed funding, including GREE Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, and Y Combinator.
Along with the funding, Monk’s Hill Ventures’ Co-Founder and Managing Partner Kuo-Yi Lim joins Saleswhale’s Board of Directors.
The firm plans to use this investment to expand its teams in engineering, customer success, and sales and marketing.
It also looks to extend its offerings to meet growing demand from enterprise customers globally, by developing new features like salesforce integration and enterprise work flows.
Serving 145 Global Customers With Email Bots
After their US$1.2 million seed funding round two years ago, Saleswhale had been working on bulking up their then 5-people team of engineers.
They have now grown to 28 employees, and are serving 145 clients across mid-market and Fortune 500 companies including Randstad and General Assembly.
Their proprietary technology, Saleswhale AI Assistant, helps companies handle emails with potential prospects and qualifies their leads, before passing them on to a human sales representative when ready.
Unlike most automated responses, the assistant can have a customised ‘persona’ and gives responses as a human would.
By doing this, the software helped to generate close to US$60 million in sales pipelines from qualified leads in 2018 alone.
Lim, who just joined Saleswhale’s Board, says the assistant’s role is in closing the gap where, usually, genuine leads “fall though the cracks in the hand-off from marketing to sales”.
Saleswhale CEO and Co-Founder Gabriel Lim believes AI assistants will become “ubiquitous” in the near future as global enterprises are increasingly recognising the efficiency automation can bring.
“Chief Marketing Officers and Directors today need a scalable and cost-efficient solution that delivers a return on investment, bridges the sales-marketing gap, and supports sales teams in qualifying genuine buyers,” he said.
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