Meet the artificially intelligent tipster for sales execs that just bagged seed funding

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Last year, I signed up for an eight-week-long course on entrepreneurship. Most of my classmates were aspiring entrepreneurs – many of them techies who had already taken the plunge into the startup pool and were finding it tough to paddle.

The first task assigned to us was to sell an idea to someone. Make that someone pay INR 1,000 (US$15) for that idea you were selling. That’s roughly the amount you would spend if you make a trip to Starbucks or the local multiplex for a movie with your partner. But I failed. Not once or twice, but five times. And most of my classmates failed as well.

That was our first lesson. To understand how tough it is to sell.

You might have built the most amazing tech tool that could transform business, but if you or your sales team cannot sell it, your company will die. The swiftness of death might be determined by the money you have in the bank, but die it will.

This gets even scarier for startups building innovative tech products for other businesses. To sell a new product that the market hasn’t seen the likes of, carpet bombing won’t work.

PipeCandy helps sales executives find the right prospects and segment them based on industry-specific criteria.

Here’s where artificial intelligence comes in handy. Say you have an AI tool for ecommerce companies. From the thousands of ecommerce companies out there, you have to shortlist the ones who are most likely to be receptive to buying tech muscle. Within those companies, you have to find the right person with tech knowhow to understand your product and the power to make the decision to buy it. This is what PipeCandy does.

It helps sales executives find the right prospects and segment them based on industry-specific criteria. It tracks over 50,000 companies in ecommerce, retail, mobile, and software-as-a-service verticals currently.

“We collect deep attributes of these companies and uncover industry-specific insights which are relevant for sales execs and reps. This will increase response rates for them,” Ashwin Ramasamy, co-founder and chief marketing officer of PipeCandy, tells Tech in Asia.

The company, founded by Shrikanth Jagannathan, Murali Vivekanandan, and Ashwin, recently raised US$1.1 million in seed capital from IDG Ventures, Axilor Ventures, Emergent Ventures, Indian Angel Network, and a few entrepreneurs. The year-and-a-half-old company announced the round today.

PipeCandy co-founders Shrikanth Jagannathan (left), Ashwin Ramasamy (center), and Murali Vivekanandan. Photo credit: PipeCandy.

A couple of days back, IDG and Axilor announced a new program to find and fund deep tech startups. PipeCandy fits in well.

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