Salesken raises $22 million in funding from Microsoft, Sequoia

Salesken, a sales conversation AI startup, on Monday said it has raised USD 22 million (about Rs 163.5 crore) in funding, led by M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund.

Existing investor Sequoia India also participated in the Series B round. Salesken will use the funds to accelerate expansion into the North American market and invest further into its proprietary deep tech product.

Salesken improves the revenue per representative by developing insights on gaps in their sales calls and bridging the gap with real-time cues to the sales reps.

Salesken co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Surga Thilakan said the company expects to grow its 125-member team to 250 over the year (March 2022) with increased hiring in technology, data science and partially hiring in the US for sales and marketing growth.

With the increasing advent of remote selling across industries, conversation AI (artificial intelligence) tools that provide visibility and insights to sales leaders have become a must-have in the sales stack. Salesken is addressing a critical need down the line of making the insights actionable with sales reps, that translate into higher rep productivity," she said.

She added that as remote selling has now become more mainstream, Salesken helps reduce onboarding time by 2-3 months, through live assistance to sales reps from day zero.

Thilakan said the US currently contributes 10 per cent of the company's revenue, which is expected to touch 30 per cent next year.

"Salesken has dramatic outcomes on sales conversions, improving top-line by 20-25 per cent within a few months of use. This RoI impact has seen us grow by over 300 per cent in the last year. We are looking forward to keeping up the pace of our growth and continue to hire the best quality talent to help us in our journey of building a world-class product, Thilakan added.

Salesken's launched commercial operations in January 2020. They are headquartered in Bengaluru, India, and have operations in Delaware, US.

Mapping customer personas to relevant products, reading customer emotions, and delivering relevant playbook-aligned responses is a persistent challenge for inside sales teams. These challenges persist despite existing efforts to improve sales outcomes through training, pre-call preparation, and post-call analytics," M12 Partner Abhi Kumar said.