A Seattle startup founded by veteran entrepreneurs landed investment for its artificial intelligence tool that helps account executives engage with customers.
A new SEC filing revealed that Docket raised $5.35 million. Arjun Pillai, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, confirmed the funding to GeekWire but declined to share additional details. Foundation Capital General Partner Ashu Garg is listed as a director in the filing.
“I believe AI will heavily augment the future of sales to make it easier on both the seller and buyer sides,” Pillai told GeekWire.
Docket sells an AI platform billed as a “virtual sales engineer.” The tool uses large language models trained on a business’ information to construct a knowledge graph. The goal is to become part of an account executive’s daily workflow, making it easier for them to ask the right discovery questions and provide answers to complex product inquiries.
“While the investments on the top of the funnel are very high, there hasn’t been enough innovation in the account executive (seller) phase,” Pillai said. “Account executive, sales enablement and product marketing will look very different once Docket takes full shape.”
Pillai most recently served as chief data officer at business intelligence giant ZoomInfo. Prior to that, he founded Seattle AI startup Insent, which ZoomInfo acquired in 2021 as part of an effort to integrate a chatbot function into the company’s suite of tools.
Pillai is joined by co-founder Anoop Thomas Mathew. They both previously co-founded Profoundis, a Kerala, India-based tech software development company. The startup was acquired by Denver-based cloud software company FullContact in 2016. After the acquisition, Pillai eventually became head of data strategy at FullContact, while Mathew served as senior product manager. Mathew most recently founded Iterflow, a tool for Web3 infrastructure.
A number of Seattle sales companies are releasing AI marketing and sales products: Highspot announced in June that it was rolling out AI tools for sales-enablement; Vieu, which emerged from stealth last month, offers an AI tool that provides buyer intelligence for customer engagement; Outreach revealed a GPT-powered email tool earlier this year; and Microsoft unveiled in February its Viva Sales platform, which uses GPT to auto-suggest emails for sales reps.
