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Defy Partners leads $3M round into sales intelligence platform Aircover
Aircover raised $3 million in seed funding to continue developing its real-time sales intelligence platform.
Defy Partners led the round with participation from Firebolt Ventures, Flex Capital, Ridge Ventures and a group of angel investors.
The company, headquartered in the Bay Area, aims to give sales teams insights relevant to closing the sale as they are meeting with customers. Aircover’s conversational AI software integrates with Zoom and automates parts of the sales process to lead to more effective conversations.
“One of the goals of launching the Zoom SDK was to provide developers with the tools they need to create valuable and engaging experiences for our mutual customers and integrations ecosystem,” said Zoom’s CTO Brendan Ittelson via email. “Aircover’s focus on building sales intelligence directly into the meeting, to guide customer-facing teams through the entire sales cycle, is the type of innovation we had envisioned when we set out to create a broader platform.”
Aircover’s founding team of Andrew Levy, Alex Young and Andrew’s brother David Levy worked together at Apteligent, a company co-founded and led by Andrew Levy, that was sold to VMware in 2017.
Chatting about pain points on the sales process over the years, Levy said it felt like the solution was always training the sales team more. However, by the time everyone was trained, that information would largely be out-of-date.
Instead, they created Aircover to be a software tool on top of video conferencing that performs real-time transcription of the conversation and then analysis to put the right content in front of the sales person at the right time based on customer issues and questions. This means that another sales expert doesn’t need to be pulled in or an additional call scheduled to provide answers to questions.
“We are anticipating that knowledge and parsing it out at key moments to provide more leverage to subject matter experts,” Andrew Levy told TechCrunch. “It’s like a sales assistant coming in to handle any issue.”
He considers Aircover in a similar realm with other sales team solutions, like Chorus.ai, which was recently scooped up by ZoomInfo, and Gong, but sees his company carving out space in real-time meeting experiences. Other tools also record the meetings, but to be reviewed after the call is completed.
“That can’t change the outcome of the sale, which is what we are trying to do,” Levy added.
The new funding will be used for product development. Levy intends to double his small engineering team by the end of the month.
He calls what Aircover is doing a “large interesting problem we are solving that requires some difficult technology because it is real time,” which is why the company was eager to partner with Bob Rosin, partner at Defy Partners, who joins Aircover’s board of directors as part of the investment.
Rosin joined Defy in 2020 after working on the leadership teams of Stripe, LinkedIn and Skype. He said sales and customer teams need tools in the moment, and while some are useful in retrospect, people want them to be live, in front of the customer.
“In the early days, tools helped before and after, but in the moment when they need the most help, we are not seeing many doing it,” Rosin added. “Aircover has come up with the complete solution.”
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4 ways to leverage ROAS to triple lead generation
Businesses that don’t invest in their future may not have a future to look forward to.
Whether you’re investing in your human resources or in critical tech, some outlay in the short term is always needed for long-term success. That’s true when it comes to marketing as well — you can’t market your product or service without investing in advertising. But if that investment isn’t turning into leads and conversions, you’re in trouble.
A “good” ROAS score is different for each company and campaign. If your figure isn’t where you’d like it to be, you can leverage ROAS data to create targeted campaigns and personalized experiences.
It’s vital to identify and apply the most suitable metrics based on business goals, and there’s no one best practice or one-size-fits-all method.
However, smart use of the return on advertising spend (ROAS) data can triple lead generation, as I discovered when I joined Brightpearl to restructure the marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at some of the ways Brightpearl used ROAS to improve campaigns and increase lead generation. The key is to work out what represents a healthy ROAS for your business so that you can optimize accordingly.
Use the right return metric
It is paramount to choose the right return metric to calculate your ROAS. This will depend partly on your sales cycle.
Brightpearl has a lengthy sales cycle. On average it’s two to three months, and sometimes up to six months, meaning we don’t have tons of data on a monthly basis if we want to use new customer’s revenue data as the return metric. A company with a shorter sales cycle could use revenue, but that doesn’t help us to optimize our campaigns.
We chose to use the sales accepted opportunity (SAO) value instead. It usually takes us about a month to measure, so we can get more ROAS data at the same time. It’s the last sales stage before a win, and it’s more in line with our company goal (to grow our recurring annual revenue), but takes less time to gather the data.
By the SAO stage, we know which leads are good quality — they have the budget, are a good fit, and our software can meet their requirements. We can use them to measure our campaign performance.
When you choose a return metric, you need to make sure it matches your company goal without taking ages to get the data. It also has to be measurable at the campaign level, because the aim of using ROAS or other metrics is to optimize your campaigns.
Accept that less is more
I’ve noticed that many companies harbor a fear of missing out on opportunities, which leads them to advertise on all available channels instead of concentrating resources on the most profitable areas.
Prospects usually do their research on multiple channels, so you might try to cover all the possible touch points. In theory, this could generate more leads, but only if you had an unlimited marketing budget and human resources.
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Olsam raises $165M to buy up and scale consumer and B2B Amazon Marketplace sellers
On the heels of Heroes announcing a $200 million raise earlier today, to double down on buying and scaling third-party Amazon Marketplace sellers, another startup out of London aiming to do the same is announcing some significant funding of its own. Olsam, a roll-up play that is buying up both consumer and B2B merchants selling on Amazon by way of Amazon’s FBA fulfillment program, has closed $165 million — a combination of equity and debt that it will be using to fuel its M&A strategy, as well as continue building out its tech platform and to hire more talent.
Apeiron Investment Group — an investment firm started by German entrepreneur Christian Angermayer — led the Series A equity round, with Elevat3 Capital (another Angermayer firm that has a strategic partnership with Founders Fund and Peter Thiel) also participating. North Wall Capital was behind the debt portion of the deal. We have asked and Olsam is only disclosing the full amount raised, not the amount that was raised in equity versus debt. Valuation is also not being disclosed.
Being an Amazon roll-up startup from London that happens to be announcing a fundraise today is not the only thing that Olsam has in common with Heroes. Like Heroes, Olsam is also founded by brothers.
Sam Horbye previously spent years working at Amazon, including building and managing the company’s business marketplace (the B2B version of the consumer marketplace); while co-founder Ollie Horbye had years of experience in strategic consulting and financial services.
Between them, they also built and sold previous marketplace businesses, and they believe that this collective experience gives Olsam — a portmanteau of their names, “Ollie” and “Sam” — a leg up when it comes to building relationships with merchants; identifying quality products (versus the vast seas of search results that often feel like they are selling the same inexpensive junk as each other); and understanding merchants’ challenges and opportunities, and building relationships with Amazon and understanding how the merchant ecosystem fits into the e-commerce giant’s wider strategy.
Olsam is also taking a slightly different approach when it comes to target companies, by focusing not just on the usual consumer play, but also on merchants selling to businesses. B2B selling is currently one of the fastest-growing segments in Amazon’s Marketplace, and it is also one of the more overlooked by consumers. “It’s flying under the radar,” Ollie said.
“The B2B opportunity is very exciting,” Sam added. “A growing number of merchants are selling office supplies or more random products to the B2B customer.”
Estimates vary when it comes to how many merchants there are selling on Amazon’s Marketplace globally, ranging anywhere from 6 million to nearly 10 million. Altogether those merchants generated $300 million in sales (gross merchandise value), and it’s growing by 50% each year at the moment.
And consolidating sellers — in order to achieve better economies of scale around supply chains, marketing tools and analytics, and more — is also big business. Olsam estimates that some $7 billion has been spent cumulatively on acquiring these businesses, and there are more out there: Olsam estimates there are some 3,000 businesses in the U.K. alone making more than $1 million each in sales on Amazon’s platform.
(And to be clear, there are a number of other roll-up startups beyond Heroes also eyeing up that opportunity. Raising hundreds of millions of dollars in aggregate, others that have made moves this year include Suma Brands [$150 million], Elevate Brands [$250 million], Perch [$775 million], factory14 [$200 million], Thrasio [currently probably the biggest of them all in terms of reach and money raised and ambitions], Heyday, The Razor Group, Branded, SellerX, Berlin Brands Group [X2], Benitago, Latin America’s Valoreo and Rainforest and Una Brands out of Asia.)
“The senior team behind Olsam is what makes this business truly unique,” said Angermayer in a statement. “Having all been successful in building and selling their own brands within the market and having worked for Amazon in their marketplace team – their understanding of this space is exceptional.”
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Sales experience platform Walnut raises $15M to improve product demonstrations
Walnut raised $15 million in Series A funding, led by Eight Roads Ventures, to continue developing its sales experience platform.
Founders Yoav Vilner and Danni Friedland started the company in July 2020. Vilner told TechCrunch that while at a previous company, he was building a category called technology marketing in Israel. He realized that company sales people often ran into problems when it was time to demonstrate their product — the product would break, or they would have to ask another department to open something or add a feature, none of which happened instantaneously, Vilner added.
He and Friedland’s answer to that problem is a no-code platform for teams to create customized product demonstrations quickly, be able to integrate them into their sales and marketing processes and then generate insights from the demos.
Walnut engagement example. Image Credits: Walnut
“We let the sales and marketing teams replicate the SaaS product in our cloud environment, which is disconnected from the back end,” Vilner explained. “They can create a storyline to fit their customer and the demonstration, and then following the demo, sales leaders can get insight on what was good or bad. It encourages the sharing of knowledge and what story worked best for which kind of company.”
The company’s latest round gives it $21 million raised to date, and follows a $6 million seed round that included NFX, A Capital, Liquid2 Ventures and Graph Ventures, Vilner said.
Walnut serves over 60 business-to-business clients, including Adobe, NetApp, Varonis and People AI. In addition to Tel Aviv, the company has offices in New York and London.
Vilner intends to use the new funding to grow the team across the U.S, Europe and Israel and continue developing its technology and platform, including tools to embed demos into a website for product-led growth. He also expects to double the team of 25 over the next year.
Eyal Rabinovich, an investor at Eight Roads Ventures, said his brother is a Walnut customer, and the company fits with one of the firm’s theses around broad vertically integrated brands in SaaS and deep technology.
Rabinovich was tracking the sales enablement space for a while and said many companies claim to provide something unique, but it is usually workflow and processes. In Walnut’s case, it is solving something at the core of sales.
“They make everything measurable, and the ‘holy grail’ is conversion, and even just 1% conversion could mean millions of dollars,” he added. “Every company we spoke to wanted to use this product. Customers were telling us they closed the sales cycle within two weeks.”
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Are B2B SaaS marketers getting it wrong?
Which terms come to mind when you think about SaaS?
“Solutions,” “cutting-edge,” “scalable” and “innovative” are just a sample of the overused jargon lurking around every corner of the techverse, with SaaS marketers the world over seemingly singing from the same hymn book.
Sadly for them, new research has proven that such jargon-heavy copy — along with unclear features and benefits — is deterring customers and cutting down conversions. Around 57% of users want to see improvements in the clarity and navigation of websites, suggesting that techspeak and unnecessarily complex UX are turning customers away at the door, according to The SaaS Engine.
That’s not to say SaaS marketers aren’t trying: Seventy percent of those surveyed have been making big adjustments to their websites, and 33% have updated their content. So how and why are they missing the mark?
They say there’s no bigger slave to fashion than someone determined to avoid it, and SaaS marketing is no different. To truly stand out, you need to do thorough competitor analysis.
There are three common blunders that most SaaS marketers make time and again when it comes to clarity and high-converting content:
- Not differentiating from competitors.
- Not humanizing “tech talk.”
- Not tuning their messaging to prospects’ stage of awareness at the appropriate stage of the funnel.
We’re going to unpack what the research suggests and the steps you can take to avoid these common pitfalls.
Blending into the competition
It’s a jungle out there. But while camouflage might be key to surviving in the wild, in the crowded SaaS marketplace, it’s all about standing out. Let’s be honest: How many SaaS homepages have you visited that look the same? How many times have you read about “innovative tech-driven solutions that will revolutionize your workflow”?
The research has found that of those using SaaS at work, 76% are now on more platforms or using existing ones more intensively than last year. And as always, with increased demand comes a boom in competition, so it’s never been more important to stand out. Rather than imitating the same old phrases and copy your competitors are using, it’s time to reach your audience with originality, empathy and striking clarity.
But how do you do that?
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B2B sales platform Accord adds $1M to seed round
Accord opened up its previously announced $6 million seed round to accept over $1 million from a group of CEOs and sales leads at companies they are working with to officially launch its business-to-business sales platform.
Brothers Ross and Ryan Rich co-founded the San Francisco-based company in 2019 with Wayne Pan to create a customer collaboration platform that, in the words of CEO Ross Rich, “makes the process of buying and selling suck less.”
The average sales deal can involve 14 people, just on the buyer side, which means teams do a lot of “herding cats” in order to drive consensus on sales, he said.
Instead, Accord’s application provides shared next steps and milestones for buying and selling teams to align on so that the right people are looped in at the right time.
“Our unique approach is helping management and sales, but also helping the buyer, which is how you build a relationship,” Ross Rich explained. “Before COVID, you could go onsite, but now you can’t do that. You also have to adjust to the buyer’s expectations, and with business-to-consumer, everything is ‘now and immediate.’ ”
The company’s target market is technology startups, but Ross Rich said Accord is now attracting interest from medical device companies and others where there is no software that bridges the gap between external parties.
Over the past six months, Accord doubled its team and was approached by multiple companies with acquisition offers. However, just a year-and-a-half into the company Rich said he is not entertaining those kinds of offers just yet.
“We have barely scratched the surface and would be selling ourselves short not having had a swing at it,” he added.
The company decided to focus on non-institutional investors when it raised this uncapped round, opting not to grow the board, Rich said.
Instead, it gathered a group of CEOs and sales leads from companies it works with — people who were getting it and seeing the value, including Mike Murchison, co-founder and CEO of Ada Support, who said via email that Ada’s B2B growth “exploded in part because of our focus on being a true partner — not simply a vendor — to our clients.” He added that Accord made it easy for Ada’s sales teams to offer a collaborative buying process.
Another investor, Stephanie Schatz, one of Accord’s advisors, said via email she got in on the round due to Ross Rich having “all the right ingredients for a successful founder,” and the product, which she said was taking into account how people want to buy.
“Ross has intelligence, drive, passion, vision and charisma, but on top of that, I have found that he has excellent instincts for leading a team and building a generational company,” she added. “Accord offers CEOs and sales leaders the opportunity to build a high-performing sales team from the very beginning that truly puts customers at the center.”
The new funding will go toward the general launch of the platform and adding to its team of 13. Rich expects a Series A round to quickly follow.
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These simple metrics will tell you if your startup is ready to scale
Finding go-to-market fit (GTM) is a pivotal moment for a startup. It means you’ve found a repeatable formula for finding and winning lead that can be written into a repeatable GTM playbook. But before you scale up your sales and marketing, you should check the metrics to make sure you’re ready.
So, how do you know when your startup is ready to scale? I’ll help you answer this using numbers you can calculate on a napkin.
You have to consider three metrics — gross churn rate, the magic number and gross margin. With these, you can measure the health and profitability of your business. By combining them into a simple equation, you can get your LTV:CAC ratio (long-term customer value to customer acquisition cost), which is a measure of your business’ long-term financial outlook. If the LTV:CAC is over 3, you’re ready to scale.
Whatever your particular business, it’s worth spending some time with these metrics to find realistic targets that will push LTV:CAC over 3. Otherwise, you might be in danger of running off a cliff.
Let’s unpack the three basic metrics:
Gross churn rate (GCR) is a measure of product-market fit (PMF). GCR is the percentage of recurring revenue lost from customers that didn’t renew. It answers the question: Do your customers stay with you? If your customers don’t stick with you, you haven’t found PMF.
GCR = Lost monthly recurring revenue / Total MRR.
Example: At the beginning of March, the company brought in $60,000 in MRR. By the end of the month, $15,000 worth of contracts didn’t renew.
GCR = $15,000 / $60,000 = 0.25, or 25% GCR.
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Outplay gets $7.3M from Sequoia Capital India to help outbound sales team scale their campaigns
Outbound sales managers typically rely on high volumes of inquiries to find customers, but this means that their revenue is often in proportion to the size of their team. Outplay helps them scale more easily with tools that automate campaigns, identifies the likeliest prospects and uses data to decide the right time to send pitches. The company announced today it has raised $7.3 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital India.
The new capital will be used for tech development and hiring, and brings Outplay’s total raised so far to $9.3 million. Its previous funding was a $2 million raise from Sequoia Capital India’s Surge announced in March after Outplay took part in the program’s fourth cohort.
Since its seed round, Outplay says it has grown its revenue four times and now has customers in more than 50 countries, serving primarily B2B software companies.
Outplay was founded in 2019 by brothers Ram and Lax Papineni. The two previously launched AppVirality, a referral marketing tool for app developers.
Outplay was designed for sales team who contact prospects through multiple channels, like phone calls, emails, SMS, LinkedIn and Twitter. It integrates the channels into one interface, so salespeople don’t have to switch between apps. Outplay also automates sequences, or marketing campaigns that include an initial pitch sent through various channels and automatic follow-up messages if a reply isn’t received within a preset time.
The platform is meant to replace the process of cold-calling potential customers, which is time-consuming and difficult to scale, and enable salespeople to focus on the best prospects, helping them decide which channel to use and when to contact them.
Since its seed funding, Outplay has launched several new tools and features, including a Chrome extension that lets salespeople add prospects from LinkedIn and Gmail, send emails, make calls and perform other tasks without having to visit Outplay’s dashboard. It also added integrations with sales tools like Gong, Dynamics CRM and Zapier (Outplay was already integrated with customer relationship management platforms Pipedrive, Salesforce and HubSpot).
One major new feature is Magic Outbound Chat, a web chat box that is launched when a prospective customer clicks on an email link. Salespeople are notified and provided with context about the prospect. Laxman told TechCrunch that most chat boxes are designed for inbound sales teams, and Magic Outbound Chat has helped some of its teams grow their sales pipeline by 300%.
Laxman said that the onboarding process for Outplay takes just a few days and sales managers are provided with a playbook of successful sequences to help them get started.
Outplay’s competitors include unicorns Outbound and SalesLoft. Laxman said that in the mid-2000s, inbound sales processes and tech began rapidly evolving as SaaS adoption increased, but outbound sales teams still relied on the same high-volume tactics they had been using for years.
“The previous outbound sales tech disruption happened in 2011 when Outreach and Salesloft were founded. We really respect what they have done to the industry, but the approach is not scalable and the revenue eventually becomes a function of the size of the outbound sales team,” he said, adding that Outplay is changing the process by using data-driven signals to help sales representatives engage with the likeliest prospects at the right time in the right channel.
For example, Outplay’s Dynamic Sequencing automatically moves prospects from one sequence to another that has a higher chance of success. In one scenario, Outplay can be configured to move a prospective who opens a sales representative’s email more than four times to another sequence that focuses on people who appear interested in a product. Laxman said some of its customers have seen open rates as high as 80% in the second sequence with Dynamic Sequencing.
In a statement, Sequoia India principal Harshjit Sethi said, “Outbound sales needs are evolving rapidly and reps now need personalized, automated and contextual tools to drive sales which Outplay is successfully enabling. Sales reps spend an average of four hours per day on Outplay, demonstrating the effectiveness of the product which has category-leading customer reviews.”
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Slintel scores $20M Series A as buyer intelligence tool gains traction
One clear outcome of the pandemic was that it pushed more people to do their shopping online, and that was as true for B2B as it was for B2C. Knowing which of your B2B customers are most likely to convert puts any sales team ahead of the game. Slintel, a startup providing that kind of data, announced a $20 million Series A today.
The company has attracted some big-name investors, with GGV leading the round and Accel, Sequoia and Stellaris also participating. The investment brings the total raised to over $24 million, including a $4.2 million seed round from last November.
That’s a quick turnaround from seed to A, and company founder and CEO Deepak Anchala says that while he had plenty of runway left from the seed round, the demand was such that it seemed prudent to take the A money sooner than he had planned. “So we had enough cash in the bank, but investors came to us and we got a pretty good valuation compared to the previous round, so we decided to take it and use that money to go faster,” Anchala said.
Certainly the market dynamics were working in Slintel’s favor. Without giving revenue details, Anchala said that revenue grew 5x last year in the middle of the worst of the pandemic. He says that meant buyers were spending less time with sales and marketing folks to understand products and more time online researching on their own.
“So what Slintel does as a product is we mine buyer insights. We understand where the buyers are in their journey, what their pain points are, what products they use, what they need and when they need it. So we understand all of this to create a 360-degree view of the buyer that you provide these insights to sales and marketing teams to help them sell better,” he said.
After growing at such a rapid clip last year, the company expected more modest growth this year at perhaps 3x, but with the added investment, he expects to grow faster again. “With the funding we’re actually looking at much bigger numbers. We’re looking at 5x in our revenue this year, and also trying for 4x revenue next year.”
He says that the money gives him the opportunity to improve the product and put more investment into marketing, which he believes will contribute to additional sales. Since the round closed six weeks ago, he says that he has increased his advertising budget and also hopes to attract customers via SEO, free tools on the company website and events.
The company had 45 employees at the time of its seed round in November and has more than doubled that number in the interim, to 100 spread out across 10 cities. He expects to double again by this time next year as the company is growing quickly. As a global company with some employees in India and some in the U.S., he intends to be remote-first even after offices begin to reopen in different areas. He says that he plans to have company gatherings each quarter to let people gather in person on occasion.
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Gong going gangbusters, grabs $250M Series E on $7.25B valuation
Gong, the revenue intelligence startup, has been raising capital at a rapid pace, and today the company announced another $250 million on a $7.25 billion valuation, a number that triples its previous valuation from last summer.
Franklin Templeton led today’s festivities with participation from Coatue, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, Thrive Capital and Tiger Global. The company raised $200 million last August at a $2.2 billion valuation, and has now raised $584 million, $450 million coming in the last year.
What is making investors open their wallets and pull out such large sums of cash? The company is helping solve a hard problem on how to bring more intelligence to the revenue process. They do this by using artificial intelligence to listen to every customer interaction, whether that’s a sales or service call (or anything else), and use that information to determine valuable information like who is most likely to buy and who is most likely to churn.
It’s been going well and CEO Amit Bendov says the company’s performance really validates the valuation. While he wasn’t ready to discuss specific numbers, he did say that ARR grew 2.3x between Q1 last year and this year, and he says Q2 is on pace to triple ARR.
“The valuation is up about 3x from last summer, but sales are more than 3x. We have high logo customers. [Last year], it was still unclear how COVID was going to impact us. People believed [our business] was going to do well [during the pandemic], but it wasn’t as obvious. Now, it is obvious. And all the […] financials are way better, so from a pure financials [perspective] our multipliers are pretty reasonable for our revenue trajectory,” he said.
With all this growth, the company is adding employees at a rapid pace. It closed the year with 400 people, and is up to around 550 today with a goal of reaching 950 by year end. It has partnered with a consulting firm called ReadySet, which helps companies build diverse and inclusive organizations, and Bendov says they are an equal-pay company.
Women represent around 40% of the employees and around 4% are Black, a number he hopes to increase by growing the Atlanta office. In the office in Israel, he has set up employment and training programs to build bridges to the Arab community.
Bendov says he looks forward to meeting his U.S. employees in the coming weeks when he’ll be visiting the Atlanta office for the first time.
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