SiftHub, an AI startup founded by the previous CTO and co-founder of LogiNext, Manisha Raisinghani, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding to construct out its AI assistant, which is aimed toward helping sales and presales teams focus more on constructing relationships and fewer on grunt work.
The corporate’s generative AI assistant is targeting the majority of non-sales activity that sales personnel must cope with, like entering data into CRM systems, filing requests for proposals (RFPs), researching customer info and constructing presentation decks. SiftHub integrates with sources of data like Google Drive, Slack, Zendesk, HubSpot and Salesforce, and sales and presales teams can simply check with its AI assistant to finish infosec questionnaires, vendor assessment forms, and file RFPs and request for information (RFI) forms. The assistant is accessible through Slack and Microsoft Teams as a bot, as a Microsoft add-in, a Chrome plugin, and an online app, and has support for 10 languages, including Spanish and German.
“When salespeople are selling to businesses, they ought to be spending more time constructing relationships, which has a direct impact on the highest line,” Raisinghani told TechCrunch. “Once you don’t must hire so many presales people to do the deep technical be just right for you, you’re saving time and that impacts your bottom line,” she told TechCrunch.
SiftHub’s AI assistant is built on open-source large language models (LLMs), and is supported by retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology, which uses additional data sources to fine-tune the standard of content generated by AI. Using RAG on top of LLMs helps SiftHub limit hallucinations — a standard issue with generative AI, where the system generates incorrect or misleading results. The startup also uses cross-encoders to forestall its platform from picking the improper information from a given knowledge base. Cross-encoders analyze two queries concurrently, as a substitute of each individually, to deliver more accurate answers.
“We’d moderately not give a solution moderately than give the improper answer,” Raisinghani said. The founder added that SiftHub’s system might give 5% fewer answers, but she is confident that at the very least 75% of the AI’s responses will probably be correct.
SiftHub also uses a “smart search algorithm” that considers the recency of documents or knowledge sources to surface relevant recent information, Raisinghani said.
After spending over 10 years at LogiNext, Raisinghani saw the necessity for an answer like SiftHub when she was advising blockchain startup Polygon Labs in 2022 on its enterprise go-to-market strategy. She realized that finding details about Polygon was an arduous task because data was not available through a single channel, because it was stored across multiple platforms. Sales and presales people need a whole lot of info about their company and its business operations after they reach out to their potential customers. Finding that info through different sources, including the corporate’s Slack channels and other unorganized documentation, is a cumbersome task that may take a whole lot of time.
She then spoke with about 200 users to grasp the issue statement higher and categorize their responses into different use cases. All that eventually brought her focus to sales and presales teams.
“Sales teams have a shadow team — a presales team or solutions engineers — and so they are often the unsung heroes of the organization. They do a whole lot of the technical work, right from filing RFPs (request for proposals) to finding answers to customers’ questions,” she explained. “If you happen to’re saving time for each sales and presales, salespeople will mechanically have the opportunity to spend more time on relationship constructing.”
The marketplace for AI startups specializing in sales and presales operations has gained traction up to now 12 months since generative AI took off. Corporations across the spectrum, from giants like Salesforce, Zoom and Google to startups like Quilt, People.ai, and Darwin AI have built GenAI-powered tools to let salespeople simplify a big selection of tasks like filing routine forms, generating drafts for emails, filling up CRMs with publicly available information on customers, generate copy, get suggestions on which prospective customer is more likely to buy or churn, and far more.
Nevertheless, Raisinghani believes that SiftHub has a particular edge, because it sits deeper in customers’ business workflows and might solve your complete sales response problem — unlike a “wrapper around OpenAI or some other LLM.”
The startup can be banking on Raisinghani’s own experience in scaling startups and its team of 15, which incorporates some ex-entrepreneurs. “Once you’re going to present at the very least 10 years of your life to something, you should be sure that that you will be excited and also you truly consider in it for the following decade,” she said. The corporate is headquartered within the U.S., and has an R&D team in Mumbai, India.
The funding will probably be used to rent more people in product R&D, enhance the product, and help the corporate go to market. The seed round was co-led by Matrix Partners India and Blume Ventures, with participation from Neon Fund in addition to executives and founders from Superhuman, Cloudflare, DevRev, RazorPay and SuperOps.
SiftHub is initially targeting B2B firms selling to mid-market and enterprise customers with revenues between $50 million and $500 million. The AI assistant is currently available to a small group of users for early feedback, and the startup is planning a “full-blown launch” later this 12 months.
“Buyers have develop into smarter and interact sales later within the buying journey, with more advanced questions. Because of this, the expectation from sales teams has modified — they should know advanced product, technical, and legal information to get the win. Sales and presales teams lack the vital tooling to handle this latest selling environment. We’re excited by SiftHub’s vision to make use of AI to administer product knowledge in order that sales can concentrate on relationships,” said Pranay Desai, a partner at Matrix Partners India, in a prepared statement.
“SiftHub is Manisha’s second enterprise within the SaaS space. Armed with over a decade of entrepreneurial experience and a powerful track record, Manisha and her team are constructing a game-changing AI platform to remodel your complete sales and presales process. We’re excited to back the SiftHub team and be a component of their ambitious journey,” said Sanjay Nath, a partner at Blume Ventures.
