Amy raises $6M to help enterprises sell better with AI

Israeli startup Amy, which provides an AI-driven solution to help enterprise reps build better customer connections and sell at a better rate, has raised $6 million in a seed round of funding.

Sales are not a piece of cake. You have to identify a prospect, understand them (including where they come from and what are their needs/wants) and come up with a perfect pitch to establish a long-lasting business relationship. Reps spend about 20% of their working hours on this kind of research, but still find less than 50% of their initial prospects as a good fit. Plus, maintaining these connections is even more difficult as, when the network grows big, one cannot keep tabs on all their customers and touch base for continued sales.

Amy’s AI-driven answer

To solve this particular challenge, Amy offers a solution that automates the task of prospect research and provides actionable insights for generating deeper, long-lasting business relationships and making the most of them.

The platform, as the company explains, leverages all publicly available information about a prospect and transforms those strands of random data into digestible meeting briefs providing tangible personalized insights into the prospect. It covers relevant information at both company and individual levels, including things like job changes, funding, acquisitions, common experiences and news elements highlighting if they were featured for something new/interesting.

“Our proprietary [natural language processing] NLP technology takes publicly available data from the web on the prospect and summarizes it as a Booster,” Nimrod Ron, CEO and founder of Amy, told Venturebeat. “Then, we further prioritize what is most useful and present one to three Boosters, along with information about the prospect’s career and company, as part of the main brief.”

“Amy’s customers can apply that information as an icebreaker or to elevate the relationship throughout the meeting,” he added.

While the CEO did not share the exact growth numbers, he did note that their product is being used by users from companies of all sizes in English-speaking countries. It was also ranked No. 1 on Product Hunt during alpha testing.

Differentiation

Though customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Hubspot and sales intelligence platforms like Apollo or Lusha operate in the same space and simplify the task of identifying a potential customer, Amy stands out with its capabilities to build strong customer connections.

“These solutions are typically built for prospecting and don’t provide the level of deep analysis on both the individual and company level to create strong, personal business connections,” Ron said.

With this round of funding, which was led by Next Coast Ventures and Lorne Abony, the company will focus on building out its technology, particularly the NLP and machine learning bits, and expanding its presence in more English-speaking markets. Other investors who participated in the round were Jim Mellon, Eric Ludwig, Micha Breakstone, Joey Low and James Kong.

“There is a clear market need to optimize meeting experiences, given that the average professional spends hours each day in meetings,” Michael Smerklo, cofounder and managing director at Next Coast Ventures, said. “Amy’s offering addresses this need by tapping into the art of human connection in business. The platform makes business personal by enabling professionals to understand who they are about to speak with and why that person is interested in speaking with them – making meetings more effective and efficient.”

Globally, the sales intelligence market is expected to grow 10.6% from $2.78 billion in 2020 to $7.35 billion by 2030.