On Raising $17M to Build AI Based Personal Assistants for Salespeople

The inconvenience of salespeople’s approach to data capturing and CRM integration has long existed. And for decades, the traditional sales cycle and process model has been the norm that reps and leaders simply have to navigate through. But as B2B industries become more competitive in the digital age, the need to overhaul obsolete, manual practices has never been this urgent.

On today’s episode of Startups On Demand, I am joined by Eldad Postan-Koren, CEO and Co-Founder of WinnAIl, a startup that builds an artificial intelligence-based personal assistant for salespeople. The company has been operating for less than a year, raised $17 million as an initial investment, and has 25 employees.

Today, we share our thoughts on the glaring gaps in sales processes and cycles, the idea behind the inception of WinnAI, and an exclusive look at its product demo.

Omri: Why did you start Winn AI? And can you walk me through its intentions?

Eldad: The reason why I started WinnAI was to solve real problems. I think that the initial thought and initial motivation of any entrepreneur are to build things and make a big impact in the world. I think you must look for a must-have solution. Basically one of the most important things that I’m looking for is simplicity. Simple problem = simple solution = simple price – things should be simple.

We are living in a time where we don’t have that much attention, hence things should be simple. The problem that we’re solving here is really well-known, yet isn’t proven – that’s taking notes and putting the data into the CRM. 99% of salespeople don’t like to do this, and it’s because they want to sell – they don’t like to track the selling. For sales leaders, we’re solving the lack of adherence to playbooks. First, we make sure that you’re covering the talking points or the playbook for each kind of conversation. Second, we make sure that the notes and the conversations are correlated to the right talking points in real-time. And if the conversation is done, the data is pushed to the CRM right away.

{Product Demo}

Eldad: As you can see, it captures the correct information needed and connects it with the right talking points. When the conversation is done, the end of the window pops up. And right away, it’s part of a new workflow: the conversation is done, take the notes, and put them in the CRM. We help you to adapt to this workflow. On the left side, you can see the transcript; in the middle, you can see the field of the CRM, and on the right side, you’re gonna see the object name for the integration. 4 minutes after the conversation is done, everything’s complete.

Omri: I agree. And I think there are a lot of unique selling propositions here. First, is the playbook aspect. Having it on the screen makes the conversation convenient and less robotic. Secondly, is that it’s all hands-free and having it automatically integrated into the CRM. Now, can you elaborate on your product roadmap?

Eldad: In the next couple of weeks, we’re adding the recap email feature. We are building the ability to support other video conferences. The idea is to serve the customer-facing people of the company, from SDRs to support, from different scenarios to different use cases. And we are pushing very hard to support different integrations.

Omri: What kind of tech brands inspired you?

Eldad: I would say two brands that resonate really well is a) Salesforce. I think they made a big revolution in the world of sales 25 years ago. I think it was a whole new different approach on how to gather the data and streamline the process, And b) from a B2C perspective, personal assistants like Alexa – it’s our inspiration on where we want to go. I think the combination of Salesforce’s innovation and Alexa’s capabilities is the goal of Winn AI – to be bold and tackle unsolved problems.