A new Seattle startup led by veterans of Microsoft, LinkedIn, Apptio, Amperity, Skilljar and other companies landed a $1.5 million seed round for its B2B sales prospecting software.
Relevvo helps sellers reach prospects with personalized messaging that is relevant to a given buyer’s needs. It describes its software as a “relevance engine” and builds on the success of B2B sales data companies such as Outreach and ZoomInfo. The idea is to move away from “spray and pray” boilerplate messaging strategies and instead use more custom communication, at scale.
“Despite the crowded sales tools landscape, sellers are still frustrated because it’s extremely hard for them to connect with B2B decision-makers,” said Relevvo co-founder Aashish Dhamdhere. “We are differentiated because we have a systematic approach to providing the missing relevant context at scale while fitting in their existing workflow and toolset. The relevant context that we provide helps the sellers find, engage, and convert high-value prospects.”
Dhamdhere previously held marketing leadership roles at Seattle startups Skilljar, Amperity, and LiquidPlanner. He also spent time at Apptio and Microsoft, where he met his co-founder Tushar Shanbhag. They were members of the team that helped launch the first Microsoft Azure cloud offering.
Shanbhag was most recently director of products at LinkedIn, and previously worked for Arimo, Cloudera, and VMWare.
Relevvo has paying customers including iSpot, Esper, Hiya, and CourseKey. It has seven employees.
Founders’ Co-op led the seed round, which included participation from Precursor Ventures and angels investors such as Amperity CEO Kabir Shahani, Logixboard CEO Julian Alvarez, Decent CEO Nick Soman, StarTree CEO Kishore Gopalakrishna, Corel CTO Prashant Ketkar (CTO, Corel), Blink Health exec Kamal Srinivasan, former Vulcan exec Art Min, and former Microsoft execs Bharat Shyam and Rao Remala.
