- Lavender announced it raised $13.2 million. These are the details.
Lavender – a provider of the leading AI-powered sales email coaching platform – announced it has raised $13.2 million in funding which includes an $11 million Series A that closed just weeks after a $2.2 million seed round. Norwest Venture Partners led the Series A round with participation from Signia Venture Partners. Signia led the seed round with participation from CapitalX and Position Ventures. Other angel and seed investors include Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox), Alex Lieberman (Morning Brew), Troy Osinoff (JUICE), and Braydan Young (Sendoso).
Lavender plans to use the funding to expand its team and introduce new AI-powered features that help revenue teams not just understand why their messaging is falling flat but also provide actionable coaching to improve productivity and generate faster responses.
Lavender’s email assistant integrates with a user’s email workflow to provide everything they need to get more replies in less time, including relevant research on a recipient and their company. And Lavender assigns an email a score of 0-100 and provides specific ways to optimize the email to get more replies, coaching sales reps on how to build meaningful relationships and close more deals.
By combining deep learning on email data with communication and behavioral psychology, Lavender’s AI writing assistant identifies and implements ways to increase reply rates. And an average sales rep spends over 15 minutes writing a personalized email, but with Lavender it can be done in 60 seconds or less. Compared to the industry standard reply rate of under 5%, Lavender users see an average of 20% or more.
The company’s customers including Twilio, Sharebite, Sendoso, Segment, Lucidworks, and Clari currently use Lavender to increase email reply rates, decrease rep onboarding time and improve sales pipelines. And this is especially important in the current market, where many teams are expected to maintain growth while lowering headcount. Lavender makes each seller more effective and more efficient.
KEY QUOTES:
“Lavender’s platform goes beyond basic AI-generated writing to augment—rather than automate—sales outreach and humanize every interaction. It supercharges sales reps by reducing their time spent writing emails so that they can focus on building relationships and selling products. We were blown away by the ‘customer love’ for Lavender’s product, which is a testament to the founding team’s deep understanding of their end user and the tight-knit community of sales leaders it has already built. We’re excited to partner with this team on the journey ahead.”
— Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners
“The impact of Lavender has been enormous. Our sellers are writing emails in half the time and getting twice as many replies—and our managers are now coaching strategically instead of on the basics.”
— Kyle Coleman, SVP of marketing at Clari
“The first time I met Scott, I knew we were going to work together. We couldn’t be more excited about this new funding and to have Norwest as our partner. Using Lavender is like giving every seller on the team a dedicated coach, making them more effective, more efficient, and more confident in their job.”
“This funding quickly accelerates our ability to build the best email experience for sellers around the world. Most importantly we’re creating new jobs as our team of #EmailWizards rapidly expands.”
— William Ballance, CEO and cofounder of Lavender
“We have spent a lot of time and resources enabling the team to efficiently send great personalized sales messages. Lavender preserves that investment! It reinforces everything we want them doing.”
— Ryan Swearingen, director, sales development strategy at Twilio
“Lavender is delivering exceptional value to our customers. Their integration provides real-time email assistance to help Salesloft customers build and deepen their relationships with prospects through better emails. We share in the mission of helping sellers be loved by the buyers they serve.”
— Devin Schiffman, vice president of global alliances at Salesloft
“Lavender has been a game changer with the sales team. Our business would not be the same without Lavender.”
— Braydan Young, co-founder of Sendoso
