When ai/”>warmly Started a couple of years ago, people met regularly on Zoom and the company provided personalized background and information about the participants. It was useful as far as it went, but when the founders had trouble selling the approach, they decided to pivot to a new idea: providing leads for sales departments by sending data about people who are in active buying mode on a website.
Today, the company announced an $11 million Series A to continue building on that vision. The round was led by Felicis with participation from NFX, Zoom Ventures, F-Prime Capital, Maven Ventures and other anonymous investors.
Co-founder and CEO Max Greenwald warmly says that the new product arose from his own problems selling his product. “We basically realized that it was a very difficult sell, and by calling ourselves Warmly, we wanted to take a warmer approach. And that’s actually what led us to focus on this next revamp of the company, which is this autonomous sales platform that automates the busy work of salespeople, but also helps hyper-targeted salespeople find the most attractive leads possible. ”Greenwald told TechCrunch.
The Warmly solution is to take a bunch of sales tools and combine them to find leads. “The Warmly platform organizes metadata from Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, Outreach, and Salesloft and combines it with intent data from 6sense, Clearbit, and Bombora to identify, track, and connect with website visitors who are in active purchasing mode,” according to the company.
Greenwald says that while there are many tools running in the background, it only takes one line of code on the website to start monitoring traffic. Look for signs that the visitor is ready to buy, and you can work with a bot to send a message or even just a greeting to the prospect, or send a Slack message to a salesperson to engage with the customer or company who appears ready. to buy. buy.
“We start taking anonymous traffic to your website and telling you who is visiting, the companies, and sometimes even people, that are visiting your website, and then in an instant we can help you take action on it,” said.
It says they have a free tier for individual sellers to attract users to the solution. When a sales team wants to participate, it costs $850 a month or about $10,000 a year, and they also have an enterprise level for more advanced sales workflows. The company has 100 paying customers as of now, including New Relic, Gainsight, and Sendoso.
With obvious implications for privacy, Greenwald says the company is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy and security requirements.
Aydin Senkut, who is leading the investment in Felicis, says one of the things that attracted him to the team is that he is a former Google employee, as are the three founders, and says it is a great training ground for founders. But most importantly, he said, it warmly solves a problem he frequently sees in the company’s portfolio companies around finding potential customers.
“We also saw, having a broad portfolio, how many of our portfolio companies struggle with this issue,” he said. “We’re very supportive of the team, maybe being a positive voice in terms of, yeah, we should double down on this latest version because it has a lot of potential.”
Greenwald says Felicis has been able to introduce some of those portfolio companies, which has been helpful in launching and refining this new version of the product.
He says the fact that they weren’t trained as salespeople was actually an advantage because they could see the problem with fresh eyes. “We weren’t indoctrinated into these kinds of values around cold-call sales, cold emails, smiles and all-day calling, and we came in and said, ‘wait, why can’t we just automate all the things? that no one really wants to do?”
