InsideSales, the Utah-based startup which offers an AI-powered sales acceleration platform, has today announced that it has topped up its coffers with a fresh $50 million Series E fundraising round. This capital infusion was led by two existing backers, namely Polaris Partners and Microsoft.
Other participants for this round include newcomers QuestMark Partners and the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, which is the finance arm of the Irish government. Existing backers — Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Hummer Winblad, U.S. Venture Partners, Epic Ventures, and Zetta Venture Partners also pumped more capital into InsideSales.
Talking about the fundraising round, Dave Barrett, managing partner at Polaris Partners, says,
Having witnessed InsideSales’ consistently impressive growth over the past few years, we’re excited to lead this round. The diverse range of investors joining us – from growth equity to corporate strategic development to sovereign funds – is representative of the broad confidence we all share in the strategy and trajectory of InsideSales as a company and the power to use AI to shape the way we all do business.
Founded by a trio of co-founders in 2004, InsideSales.com provides salespeople with a software as a service (SaaS) enterprise platform that collects, segments, and classifies data to provide tailored recommendations. It leverages machine learning techniques to give them insights into their sales activities and practices. The primary aim of this self-learning intelligent platform is to optimize sales, increase performance and court more clients.
The company currently employs nearly 500 employees and has more than 2,000 clients including the likes of DP, Groupon, and Microsoft. It has recently also launched PlayBooks, a plugin which enables the user to follow its leads directly within the browser.It enables you to get rid of multiple tools and prioritize sales engagement plans for your needs. This has proven to be extremely popular among millennials, says the company.
This funding round takes the total capital raised by InsideSales to a massive $250 million and values it at more than $1 billion. Previously, the company had raised $60 million in Series D from Salesforce Ventures and Microsoft in early 2015. The company wasn’t on a look out for fresh funds but the founding team’s visit to Ireland sparked interest and things started to take shape.
The company plans to use the freshly infused capital for expanding the reach of InsideSales’ technology platform to new geographies. And it is starting off with Europe, courtesy of the Irish Government. The company sees this a jumping point to extend its roots into new locations, while also working on product development. A chunk of the investment will go into the development of new platforms and fostering growth of its clients.
Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales, talks about the fresh investment saying,
With this financing, we further cement our leadership position in a sector where customers are now expecting AI to produce real results.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is more than excited to further deepen its partnership with the AI-powered sales platform. Redmond initially pumped money into the venture during its previous funding round in 2015. Post the investment, the two technology giant has collaborated on CRM and cloud technology integration. And now, InsideSales plans to extend the reach of its recently launched PlayBooks service to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure cloud platform.
Jujhar Singh, corporate VP of Microsoft Dynamics 365 also comments on the funding as under,
With even greater focus on AI in our day-to-day lives, we’re excited to help InsideSales deliver its intelligent solutions to more workplaces through the Dynamics 365 platform.
