People.ai is a CRM application that helps businesses increase sales by finding examples of successful customer interactions. The software connects to all sales force's systems. By analyzing phone calls, emails, and online meetings, AI helps check employees' work. It creates a report of where her work needs to be improved to increase sales. For example, if the last transaction amount of a sale is small, use the number of customer contact activities; if the sale is high, it will draw attention to the quality of the sales interaction. After implementation, the platform calculates the sales performance of each seller. As a result, People.ai clients have seen a 2-3x increase in profits.
One of the distinguishing features of People.ai's own sales process is that they invest thousands of dollars in presenting projects to potential clients and building proofs of concept (POCs) to capture interest. After the POC, the customer's investment will pay off within a week. Therefore, People.ai does not work with small businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees. In such companies, the sales department consists of 100-200 people, which can be easily trained. Sales script development takes 3-9 months per sales department. Because of this, People.ai looks for big companies with big enough budgets to turn a profit. It takes 4 months to 2 years to complete a proof of concept.
In 2017, People.ai raised $7 million in Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, before Andreessen Horowitz invested $30 million in Series B funding. In its 2019 Series C funding round, ICONIQ Capital invested $60 million to improve the software. The company is less than three years old, but investors estimate its valuation to be close to $500 million. According to Roginsky, the company will be preparing for an IPO after another funding round. TechCrunch estimates that the company's profits have nearly quintupled over the past year, and its customers raked in $100 billion in gross revenue from the service.
People.ai is trying to raise millions of dollars in a debt funding round, TechCrunch reported. Unfortunately, the outcome of the transaction is unknown. Still, the company was able to share in the $60 million it raised in 2019. Therefore, companies prefer debt financing to avoid damage to existing shareholders.
Today, People.ai has offices in San Francisco, Atlanta, Kyiv, London, New York, and Los Angeles. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, where the vast majority of its
employees work. The choice of location was a strategic decision: since the company operates in the B2B sector, it needed to communicate with customers as easily as possible, which is why they have so many locations outside Ukraine. People.ai's customers include Dropbox, Lyft, Uber, Twitter and other tech companies.
According to Oleg, all industries are changing rapidly, moving all business functions to the Internet. The People.ai team believes this transformation will take a quantum leap in the near future when data automation is combined with the practicality of artificial intelligence. In the near future, the startup will automatically collect data on market dynamics and how emails, video conferencing and meetings affect sales. This will facilitate the practical application of artificial intelligence.