Vivun is known as your sales team’s technical copilot as it helps the fastest growing companies secure more technical wins more efficiently. Following Vivun’s release of Ava, the first AI sales engineer, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Vivun CEO and co-founder Matt Darrow to learn more about the company.
Matt Darrow’s Background
What is Matt Darrow’s background? Darrow said:
“My background is in engineering, and I started my career as an engineer before I moved into technology consulting at Deloitte. I was deploying custom enterprise software for Deloitte customers, which led me into sales engineering. Like a lot of people in sales engineering, I came into the role unexpectedly; sales engineering felt like a great fit because it was a job that combined technical skills with business acumen. I spent the next decade-plus in sales engineering at Big Machines (acquired by Oracle) and Zuora (which IPO’d in 2018). At Zuora I was a global vice president of sales engineering before I became vice president of product for two of their four product lines — so I saw the challenges facing sales engineering not only at the individual contributor level but also at an organizational level.”
Formation Of Vivun
How did the idea for Vivun come together? Darrow shared:
“I didn’t always think that I was going to become a startup founder. After Zuora had gone public, my wife and I decided to take some time off and we bought one-way tickets to New Zealand to spend time outdoors and unplug. When we were in New Zealand, I had the idea for Vivun. It was a pretty simple idea: why don’t sales engineers have any dedicated software? Sales, marketing and services all have a huge selection of tools that make their jobs easier, but at that point sales engineers didn’t really have anything. My idea was to build a company that would bring together all the things I had to custom-build over 10+ years in sales engineering. Once we started thinking about that idea, we couldn’t stop. Revenue doesn’t happen without sales engineers, yet there was literally nothing for that group.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Darrow’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Darrow reflected:
“One of my favorite memories was getting our first term sheet from Unusual Ventures. I was a first-time founder and this was my first time fundraising. There were so many meetings we had with VCs where people didn’t understand pre-sales. They thought it was cold calling, they thought it was irrelevant, they thought that products just sell themselves. There was a lot of general misunderstanding for this role and this profession.”
“Getting that first term sheet was a big milestone because it was huge validation, and it was coming from one of the most important VCs in Silicon Valley — John Vrionis got what we were trying to solve for. Up until that point, we were bootstrapping the company. I had to rent my house out, we were living with our in-laws. It wasn’t the storybook startup experience where you go in with a pitch deck and people throw money at you. We put everything into this, and it was for an idea that a lot of VCs just get at first. When one of the most important VCs gets it and you get that backing, that sets everything in motion.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Darrow explained:
“When we started Vivun, our goal was to build a sales engineering platform with three core capabilities:
-Measure and manage your sales engineering organization: These teams didn’t have a system of their own for workflows and records. They had no place to keep track of deals, to assign and allocate resources, or to get insight into the KPIs that mattered around staffing and performance.
-Triage the sales forecast: The signal a revenue leader gets from sales engineering is higher quality and more predictive than the signal they’ll get from salespeople. Our goal was to allow sales engineers to partner with their sales leader counterparts to make sure the forecast was based in reality, so they knew which deals to count on and where the risks were in other deals
-Allow sales engineering to align sales and product: This came from my experience as both an SE and a product leader. If companies could strategically get sales and product working well together, they’ll do a better job. How does product understand what sales needs, and how does sales know what to sell when the product team delivers?”
“The VivunOne platform hits those three core capabilities, but everything changed 12 months ago. We’re now using AI in each of those core capabilities to execute that work without any human intervention. With the launch of Ava, our new AI sales engineering agent, we’re moving to a world and a market where we can use AI to do a lot of the work that sales engineers do which in turn frees up sales engineers to be more strategic and spend more time with customers. Creating unique solutions for customers, guiding the discovery process, answering technical questions, building and guiding demonstrations — those are all things that Ava can now do for sales engineers.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Darrow and the team faced in building the company? Darrow acknowledged:
“Vivun has had no shortage of challenges. The pandemic hit roughly six months after we raised our first dollar. We had engineers in Ukraine who were immediately impacted by Russia’s invasion in 2022. We banked with Silicon Valley Bank and went through the panic when everyone thought the money was gone. We lived through the stock market correction that led to layoffs and spending freezes in the tech sector; and not only did that make it harder for us to do deals, but all of our customers were impacted because they were using Vivun to support their sales organization.”
“And most recently, generative AI was hugely disruptive to our business. When we started Vivun, the solutions offered by generative AI weren’t even thought of as possible. We had to adapt immediately to avoid our product becoming irrelevant.”
“So even though all of those crises were hard, we were able to overcome them. We’ve had the startup mentality that there’s no problem that can’t be solved. We have amazing people at Vivun — VC partners, board members, executive staff and the people on our teams — which means we’ve had enough expertise to get through these problems. In the case of AI, our chief data scientist Joe Miller is an expert in ontology and knowledge design, which is how you get the most out of generative AI. LLMs alone aren’t going to cut it — we have one of the few people in the world who have been spending the last 10+ years working specifically with this technology.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Darrow cited:
“There are a lot of milestones we’re proud of. We’ve raised $131 million to date with some really great partners. Landing our first customer was a milestone; the first time our company got together and met in person after Covid was huge.”
“But the most significant milestone is our launch of Ava. None of this technology was possible 12 months ago, and now you’re seeing the CEOs of Salesforce and Nvidia saying that the future of technology is in AI agents. For us to be in a position to be nimble, adjust and deliver in a short period of time with real innovation on the edge of this technology — that’s a huge milestone.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Darrow about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“We’ve seen customers use Vivun to scale their businesses and outpace competitors in tight markets. Snowflake came to us because they were trying to scale their organization from 70 sales engineers to 1,000. Last year at our industry conference, Snowflake said they “struck gold with Vivun” and that we were key to supporting that growth.”
“Seismic is in a highly competitive market for sales enablement, and they’re growing three times faster than the competition in large part because their sales engineering organization is driving alignment between sales and product. They’re always able to outthink their competitors, out-launch them and make sure their deals are unblocked.”
“Coupa credits us with being a lot smarter about their technical sales team and process, and they’re able to change their ratios to reduce their cost of sales. The pre-sales team at ADP uses Vivun for a technical forecast, so they have a much higher degree of precision on the number they forecast and then go on to beat.”
“And now with Ava, the team at Dayforce are seeing this as a huge opportunity to give independence directly to account executives. They expect Ava to take massive amounts of work off of the plates of their sales engineering which will free them up to engage more with customers.”
Funding
Upon asking Darrow about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“Vivun has raised $131 million to date. We announced our most recent funding round in 2022, which was a $75 million Series C led by Salesforce Ventures. That round included participation from Tiger Global, as well as from our existing investors Menlo Ventures, Accel, and Unusual Ventures.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Darrow affirmed:
“Vivun is differentiated in two key areas. First, nobody has domain expertise in technical sales like we do. Between my co-founder John Bruce and I, we have 25 collective years of doing the job. Not only do we know exactly what needs to be built and why, we also know the work that happens in the role. That’s really important on the AI front, because you’re not going to be able to start a company that can compete with Vivun if you don’t have deep understanding of technical sales.”
“But the second point of differentiation is in how our team is able to use AI to do the work of sales engineers. Foundational models alone — the LLMs everyone reads about — are important tools, but those aren’t what allow you to do domain-specific work. If you don’t know how to deliver knowledge or represent knowledge in conjunction with the domain model, you can’t build an agent to do the actual work. Our chief data scientist and our engineering team know how to do that because of their prior work in the space. Joe Miller was working on knowledge representation well before LLMs were available, so that experience is a huge competitive advantage as we build an AI sales engineer.”
Sales Engineering As Right Target For AI Agent Automation
Why is sales engineering the right target for automation with an AI agent? Darrow pointed out”
“The perfect use case for an AI agent is one where you can help a lot of people accomplish a lot of work. An AI agent wouldn’t be a good use case for something that one person does in an organization. With an AI sales engineer, you’re helping the global sales organization. The SEs are critical because salespeople rely on them to get revenue in the door.”
“Sales engineers cost a lot of money, and the work they do is really important. They are a critical force to actually get revenue at your business, and they’re hard to find, hire, train and retain. An AI SE is going to do work that’s critical, complicated, and not easily replicated — getting AI to build a custom demo and deliver it, getting AI to synthesize the right solution for the customer based on a deep understanding of their business. That’s going to deliver a huge amount of value to a huge number of people.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Darrow concluded:
“Our goals are simple: we want to get Ava into the hands of as many go-to-market teams as possible and change B2B selling for good.”
