Singapore-based Saleswhale has secured $1.2 million in a seed round of funding led by Gree Ventures. The round was joined in by Monk’s Hill Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, and a number of angel investors including Pieter Walraven, founder of now Google-acquired Pie; early Dropbox employee Albert Ni; Juha Paananen, co-founder Nonstop Games; Royston Tay, co-founder of Zopim; and Bowei Lee, CEO of LCY Chemical Corp.
The startup, which was a part of Y Combinator’s spring 2016 program, was founded in December 2015 by Gabriel Lim, Venus Wong and Ethan Le. It will utilize the freshly raised funds to hire more backend, data, machine-learning and natural language processing engineers.
Saleswhale is an automated sales assistant that helps firms to follow up with inbound & stale leads, engage them in two-way conversation and qualify them before routing them to human sales representatives. This might not lead a company to completely delegate the work of a sales team to the assistants, but it certainly helps to reinitiate the stale leads.
Saleswhale’s product, Engage, allows a firm to set up virtual accounts which carry on the conversations with sales prospects just the way a human employee will do.
Unlike most marketing automation softwares that work on lead nurturing, Saleswhale considers itself complimentary to marketing automation software, and is designed to parse & interpret the intent of responses. It then reconcile this intent with the information that they know about your business which is there on the Saleswhale’s Knowledge Graph.
If the sales assistant is unable to answer any of the questions put forth by the sales prospect, the conversation will be escalated to your team for human review. You can then update your Knowledge Graph to give Saleswhale more information about your business, and let them know what kind of responses are to be given to specific questions – such as pricing, implementation details, competitive advantages of your product etc.
The company claims to have generated over $1.5 million through its automated sales assistants, and $130K via closed deals for their customers since February 2017.
