Photo: Saleswhale
Saleswhale, a Singapore-based conversational email AI company founded by CEO Gabriel Lim, CTO Ethan Le, and VP of Product Venus Wong, announced it has raised $5.3 million in Series A funding led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. GREE Ventures, Wavemaker Partners and Y Combinator also participated in this round.
In conjunction with this funding round, Monk’s Hill Ventures’ Co-Founder and Managing Partner Kuo-Yi Lim is joining the company board of directors. Monk Hill had also participated in Saleswhales’ seed round in 2017.
Saleswhale graduated from the Y Combinator startup accelerator program in the summer of 2016. And with this funding round, the company is planning to accelerate growth and hire additional talent. The new employees will focus on integrating the technology with third-party platforms like sales and enterprise services.
Plus the company is considering a California office, which would be for increasing its customer base and provide support for existing clients. Most of the company’s customers are in the U.S.
To handle emails, Saleswhale has developed the Saleswhale AI Assistant, which includes some AI-trained bots that can handle sales leads. These bots can arrange meetings and engage with existing leads. These bots can provide human-like responses in the emails that are sent back.
Vulcanpost reported that Saleswhale’s software was able to generate nearly $60 million in sales pipelines from qualified leads in 2018 alone. In 2018, Saleswhale saw its revenue grow 24.1x and its sales assistants engaged in 1.1 million conversations to data while collecting 300,000 data points.
Currently, Saleswhale has more than one hundred customers including recruiting company Randstad and educational organization General Assembly. As Saleswhale added more features to its platform, the company increased its prices from $39 to $99 per seat to more than $1,000 per month for enterprise customers, according to TechCrunch.
