Outreach, a Seattle-based startup that helps companies automate emails and calls for sales prospects, today announced a $2 million seed round.
Manuel Medina, CEO of the two-year-old company, said Outreach gives salespeople “superpowers” by allowing them to manage more potential customers with less time. It does this with software that can detect whether follow-up emails or calls have been responded to, and sends appropriate reminders to a salesperson.
Outreach also lets users integrate its technology into an existing CRM like Salesforce and have updates sync across both platforms. Medina described the company, which has attracted more than 200 customers in four months, as an “intelligent communication platform for high-frequency sales.”
“With Outreach, the sales motion of moving a prospect down the sales funnel becomes intelligent and algorithmic,” said Medina, a veteran of Amazon and Microsoft.
Medina said he and his co-founders (all engineers) came up with the idea for Outreach after finding a pain point in sales: Following up with contacts.
“Irrespective of the contact being cold or warm, if you are not diligent in following up, the contact is at risk of going cold at any point in the conversation or transaction,” he explained. “We realized that most people couldn’t stick to a process because they got a thousand things flying at them that make them miss their tasks and drop the ball. We also realized that many of these tasks could be performed perfectly well — or better — by a computer.”
Investors backing the company include Version One Ventures and former LinkedIn executives Sarah Imbach and Ellen Levy. New investors like Mark Sugarman of MHS Capital and Mike Maples of Floodgate also participated in the round.
The new funding will be used to hire employees — the company employs 20 — and reach more potential clients. Outreach has raised $2.4 million to date.
