The best salespeople love to pride themselves on having both a sixth sense when it comes to closing a deal, and a good number of convincing magic to get a sale online. Now, a startup which say it can help any sellers be like those high-level salespeople, and assist those top folks are even better, have increased a massive round of funds to take its company to another level.
People.ai’s valuation is estimated to be at around $500 million. Its platform consumes each of the sales data an individual will generate while functioning, and then uses it to help and guide them to more resources and also to close more deals.
It’s also launching a brand new service called The Wire, which is a feed of earnings insights to help with leads, provide hints, and assist in the complete sales process.
“Some people say it’s what LinkedIn should have been,” Oleg Rogynskyy, People.ai’s founder and CEO, said in an interview. It will help 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 in LinkedIn on areas like research and discovery.
The startup’s expansion has been fast: it has ingested 350 million sales actions, 40 million connections, includes a sales pipeline of $300 billion plus has recently closed $100 billion in deals. Revenues have been rising five times year-over-year, and most of its clients are in the technology sector near San Francisco. Its customers include Splunk, New Relic, Zoom, Lyft, and Red Hat.
People.ai’s strategy, states Rogynskyy, is not to replace salespeople but to “supercharge” the groups using AI to take”high-value, low-volume activity.” Staying in the background, expecting no active input from the consumer, it picks up all the “exhaust” generated from the process of a day, and uses it to create cookie sheets to salespeople so they can use them when talking to clients to assist them in close deals, providing exciting insights, pertinent details, and other details.