Joining Monk’s Hill Ventures are GREE Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, and Y Combinator

Saleswhale, the AI-based sales assistant platform, announced today that it has secured a US$5.3 million Series A funding led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. They were joined by GREE Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, and Y Combinator who were all participants in the seed round.

The company said that it will use the funding to scale and expand its teams in engineering, customer service, sales, and marketing.

The Singapore-based company targets mid-market and large enterprises. It plans to add features such as Salesforce integration and enterprise workflows.

“We believe that AI assistants will become ubiquitous in the near future for global enterprises, as C-suites recognise that automation is essential to scaling. Chief Marketing Officers and Directors today need a scalable and cost-efficient solution that delivers a return on investment, bridges the sales-marketing gap, and supports sales teams in qualifying genuine buyers,” said Saleswhale CEO and Co-Founder Gabriel Lim.

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Using its proprietary AI technology, Saleswhale describes its service as supporting sales and marketing teams by automating the lead engagement and qualification processes.

How it works

Saleswhale works by using natural language processing to classify the intent of the email leads, detect the sentiment, extract named entities —  including its locations, dates, times, and competitor keywords.

The leads then get propagated to its decision engine that allows real-life human operators to will double-check the AI-based processing. Depending on the output of the decision engine, a correct response then will be selected and constructed by Saleswhale, to reply to the prospect in natural human-like language.

Through its dashboard, users can immediately review a “hot” lead that’s ready to be processed by the correct human sales rep after cross-referencing the CRM. The human sales rep is cc’ed directly into the conversation.

“It normally takes around six to seven back-and-forth conversations, before or if a lead expresses intent to be contacted by a human sales rep. Once this happens, our system will be able to detect that it’s a “hot” lead,” Lim explained.

Clients of Saleswhale include over 145 teams from mid-market and Fortune 500 enterprises. Brands include Randstad, General Assembly, and Unit4. In 2018 alone, Saleswhale claimed that it generated close to US$60M in its sales pipeline from qualified leads.

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“Marketing dollars are too often lost when leads are not effectively qualified or followed up on. Good and genuine leads fall through the cracks in the hand-off from marketing to sales. The Saleswhale AI Sales Assistant platform closes this gap, stems the leakage, and leads to real top-line impact for enterprises,” said Kuo-Yi Lim, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures, who will be joining the Board of Saleswhale.

Saleswhale was part of the YC 2016 Summer cohort, the seed startup accelerator and incubator of tech unicorns including Airbnb and Dropbox.

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