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Sybill raises $11 million to fund an AI assistant, which lessens the administrative load on salespeople

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A firm called Sybill, which created an AI assistant especially for salespeople, announced on Wednesday that it had raised $11 million in a Series A funding round headed by Greycroft.

As businesses have used big language models and generative AI to help salespeople automate tedious tasks like filling out requests for bids and updating internal databases, the market for sales AI assistants has become rather saturated.

But according to Sybill, what makes its assistant unique is its capacity to keep track of and evaluate a large number of emails and call transcripts. This allows it to offer summaries and insights that are driven by context rather than just meeting notes and the transcripts of a few calls. In order to increase its customer base, the business is also focusing on salespeople rather than sales leadership, a tactic that has allowed it to enter the market swiftly.

Gorish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Sybill, stated in an interview that “people lose trust in the system very, very quickly if the AI output is not accurate.”

In order to provide sales-specific results, Sybill claims to have constructed an internal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline on top of the company’s current generative AI GPT models. Using its RAG models, the startup evaluates messages, emails, and calls between the vendor and the buyer in order to provide output that takes extra signals into account. According to Aggarwal, this deal-level analysis helps reduce prediction errors.

The majority of the repetitive, physical labor involved in sales calls should be handled by Sybill’s AI. It captures sales talks, summarizes the discussion, composes a follow-up email according to the salesperson’s writing style, and offers background information on the call. Additionally, it can automatically summarize the budget, buyer, competition, buying process, and other pertinent information (frameworks like BANT, MEDDICC, and SPICED) and make all of that information available to sales leadership. CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot can also be updated with this information.

Sybill’s competitors include transcription tools such as Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, and Zoom, as well as sales-specific solutions like Gong and Chorus.ai.

However, Aggarwal believes that one key component distinguishes his startup: “These are built like tools, not like an assistant, which is what we’re doing,” he declared.“An assistant is someone you delegate entire tasks to, which is different from a tool that ingests some data and spits out insights. We also build end-to-end workflows to solve use cases like notetaking from calls, CRM entry and follow-ups.”

Aggarwal said that he attended Stanford University’s graduate program when he first met Nishit Asnani, his co-founder. A year later, Soumyarka Mondal, the sister of Gorish Aggarwal, who had previously served as a research fellow and oversaw AI development at Harvard University and MIT, as well as Mehak Aggarwal, who had worked at Confluent, Morgan Stanley, and Salesforce, joined them.

Word-of-mouth marketing is effective

Established in 2020, Sybill increased its annual revenue from $100,000 to $1 million in just nine months in 2023, according to Aggarwal, with the majority of that growth reportedly coming from referrals. According to him, TechCrunch was informed that between 60% and 70% of its new clients and income originate from either direct recommendations or from users who transfer jobs and integrate Sybill into their new business.

According to Aggarwal, the business has already attracted more than 500 paying clients, or teams. Although these clients come from more than 30 countries, the U.S., Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and India account for the bulk of them.

The CEO claims that as businesses looked to save expenses and streamline procedures, the IT slowdown aided the startup’s expansion.

“Sybill helps their seller save more than 5 hours every week, helps management get true visibility into what’s going on, and improves the sales process efficiency,” he stated.

With the Series A round, the company has raised $14.5 million in total since its founding in 2020. Participating in the round were existing investors Neotribe Ventures, Powerhouse Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures. The startup withheld its valuation from the public.

The business plans to employ more people and develop its AI helper further with the additional funds. Sybill currently employs 30 people, but by the end of the year, she hopes to have roughly 40.

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ProRata, an AI startup, Teams up with UK Publishers after reportedly Hitting $130 Million in Valuation

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A number of well-known British media outlets have joined ProRata, an AI firm that claims to compensate publishers for the usage of their work, in its expanding network of partnerships.

The Los Angeles-based firm announced on Wednesday that it has signed licensing deals with publishers such as Sky News, the Guardian, and the Daily Mail’s publisher, DMG Media.

In a recent Series A funding round, ProRata raised $25 million from investors such as the Mayfield Fund, Prime Movers Lab, and Revolution Ventures.

“ProRata’s founder and CEO Bill Gross said his firm’s AI technology is the only one that pledges to credit and compensate creators, while providing users with accurate search results.

“We have had hundreds of content owners and media companies reach out to us from around the world who are interested in piloting our technology. Stealing and scraping content is not a sustainable path forward,” he continued.

Similar alliances have previously been formed by ProRata with the German publisher Axel Springer, the Atlantic, Fortune, Time, and Universal Music Group (UMG).

Media firms are offered reasonable compensation by ProRata for the use of their content. The startup’s in-house technology may determine the proper amount of pay by evaluating the worth of the information used to create responses from an AI platform. This would make it possible to pay copyright holders for their work on a per-use basis.

Gross had previously said that AI platforms have been using “shoplifted, plagiarized content,” which fosters an atmosphere in which “disinformation thrives and creators get nothing.”

Gross is recognized for having created the pay-per-click model of internet search monetization with his business, GoTo.com, which was eventually acquired by Yahoo! in 2003.

In a recent blog post, Tige Savage, a cofounder of Revolution, stated that Bill Gross is a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience in monetization techniques.

“He’s attracted a world-class tech team led by AI luminary Tarek Najm to implement the vision and an accomplished business team, including Annelies Jansen and Jonas Lee to drive content and AI partnerships,” Savage continued.

The unpaid use of copyrighted materials by OpenAI and other tech companies to train their AI systems has led to litigation from media companies and other content creators.

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Film Bazaar Unveils an Interactive Cinema App from an Indian Tech Startup

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Arjun Nittoor, the founder of the Indian technology firm Vireza, disclosed at Film Bazaar that the company is creating a new mobile application that would transform the experience of watching movies in theaters by enabling viewers to engage with the films in real time.

The technology, which was created wholly in-house at the company’s research and development department in Bengaluru, allows viewers to use their smartphones to vote on important plot points during the movie. To keep up with the current screening, patrons download an app before entering the theater and scan a QR code at their seat.

“The film industry is one of the few sectors where the audience experience has seen minimal technological disruption in theatres,” Nittoor stated. “While screen and sound quality have advanced and 3D has been partially adopted, the viewing experience has largely remained the same for decades.”

The screen automatically brightens to show voting options and dims again when choices are made. The system uses discreet phone notifications to encourage audience participation around every ten minutes.

In 2026, Vireza intends to introduce the technology with a full-length interactive movie that will be produced in both English and South Indian for international distribution. The business is presently in the development stage and will shortly start doing multiplex chain trial screenings.

CtrlMovie’s prior success in the interactive film industry was mentioned by Nittoor. CtrlMovie is well-known for “Traces of Responsibility” and “Late Shift.”

In order to overcome the difficulties in cinematography, editing, shot composition, and writing that plagued previous attempts at the format, the firm has spent five years creating what Nittoor refers to as “a new science of filmmaking” that is especially tailored for interactive cinema.

“Despite the proliferation of viewing devices, big-ticket films continue to draw massive crowds to theatres, with box office numbers higher than ever,”  Nittoor stated. “This demand underscores the potential for a meaningful technology shift that could draw audiences out of their homes and into cinemas.”

Other Asian businesses are likewise investigating audience-driven narrative in motion pictures. In February of the following year, Japan’s King Records intends to release “Hypnosis Mic – Division Rap Battle,” an animated interactive film.

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Perplexity, an AI business, adds retail capabilities as search competition gets more intense

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Perplexity, an artificial intelligence search firm, opened a shopping hub on Monday to draw people to its platform in an effort to challenge Alphabet-owned Google’s hegemony in the search engine market.

Supported by Amazon (AMZN.O) founder Jeff Bezos and top AI chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA.O), the company launches a new tab and will provide users with product cards that display pertinent goods in answer to shopping-related queries.

According to the company, each card offers product facts in an eye-catching manner.

Shopify (SHOP.TO), one of the platform integrations that powers the new functionality, provides access to up-to-date and pertinent information on products from companies on the Canadian e-commerce platform worldwide that ship to the United States.

The goal of e-commerce platforms has been to attract more merchants by utilizing more AI-powered solutions.

‘Snap to Shop’ is a visual search engine featured in Perplexity’s online shopping rollout that displays products based on users’ pictures of an item.

The features will initially be introduced in the US before moving on to other regions; however, no timeframe has been given.

Additionally, Perplexity is launching a “Merchant Program” to enable shops to communicate with the company about its products.

Earlier in November, Reuters reported that the business was raising $3 billion in new funding.

Since the generative AI pioneer added a number of new search features to ChatGPT, OpenAI has become a direct rival of Perplexity, which has been seeking to broaden its product line.

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