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.