Sybill, a startup that has built an AI assistant specifically for sales representatives, said on Wednesday it has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Greycroft.
The market for sales AI assistants has grown quite crowded as companies have leveraged generative AI and large language models to help salespeople automate grunt work like filling out requests for proposals, updating internal databases and the like.
However, Sybill says what sets its assistant apart is its ability to track and analyze many call transcripts and emails, which enables it to provide context-driven insights and summaries instead of only providing meeting notes and transcripts of one or two calls. The startup is also targeting salespeople instead of sales leadership to grow its customer base — a strategy that has helped it quickly penetrate the market (more on that below).
“If the AI output is not accurate, people lose trust in the system very, very quickly,” said Gorish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Sybill, in an interview.
Sybill says it has built an in-house retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline on top of existing generative AI GPT models to deliver sales-specific results. The startup analyzes calls, emails and messages between the buyer and the seller using its RAG models to keep additional signals in consideration while delivering output. This deal-level analysis helps limit inaccuracies in prediction, Aggarwal said.
Sybill’s AI promises to take care of the bulk of the repetitive, manual work involved in sales calls. It records sales conversations and then will provide a summary of the call, draft a follow-up email based on the salesperson’s writing style, and provide context about the call. It can also update fields in CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot; automatically summarize the budget, buyer, competition, buying process, and other relevant information (frameworks like BANT, MEDDICC and SPICED); and make all that information available to sales leadership.
Sybill is going up against sales-specific tools, like Gong and Chrous.ai, and transcription tools like Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, and Zoom.
But Aggarwal thinks there’s a crucial element that sets his startup apart: “These are built like tools, not like an assistant, which is what we’re doing,” he said. “An assistant is someone you delegate entire tasks to, which is different from a tool that ingests some data and spits out insights. We also build end-to-end workflows to solve use cases like notetaking from calls, CRM entry and follow-ups.”
Aggarwal told TechCrunch that he met his co-founder, Nishit Asnani, at Stanford University’s graduate school. A year later, they were joined by Soumyarka Mondal, the co-founder and CTO of Sybill, who had stints at Confluent, Morgan Stanley and Salesforce; and Mehak Aggarwal, Gorish’s sister, who previously worked as a research fellow and led AI development at Harvard University and MIT.
Word-of-mouth works
Founded in 2020, Sybill scaled its ARR from $100,000 to $1 million in ARR within 9 months in 2023, Aggarwal said, and most of that was apparently driven by referrals. Almost 60% to 70% of its new customers and new revenue come in either via direct referrals or from users who change jobs and bring Sybill into their new company, he told TechCrunch.
The startup has already secured more than 500 paying customers (teams), Aggarwal said. These customers are spread across over 30 countries, but the majority are from the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K. and India.
According to the CEO, the tech slowdown helped the startup grow its business as companies tried to cut costs and make their processes more efficient.
“Sybill helps their seller save more than 5 hours every week, helps management get true visibility into what’s going on, and improves the sales process efficiency,” he said.
The Series A round brings the company’s total raised to $14.5 million since its inception in 2020. Existing investors Neotribe Ventures, Powerhouse Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures also participated in the round. The startup did not disclose its valuation.
The company will use the new money to develop its AI assistant further reps and hire more staff. Sybill has 30 employees and plans to have about 40 staff by the end of this year.