{"id":337954,"date":"2017-04-10T11:11:41","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T03:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1474670"},"modified":"2017-04-10T11:11:41","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T03:11:41","slug":"singapores-saleswhale-which-uses-ai-to-automate-sales-emails-raises-1-2m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/singapores-saleswhale-which-uses-ai-to-automate-sales-emails-raises-1-2m\/","title":{"rendered":"Singapore\u2019s Saleswhale, which uses AI to automate sales emails, raises $1.2M"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Saleswhale<\/a>, a Singapore-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to let\u00a0companies automate their sales emails, has raised a $1.2 million seed round.<\/p>\n

The capital was provided by VC firms Monk\u2019s Hill Ventures, Gree Ventures and Wavemaker Partners with a number of angel investors. Those include early Dropbox hire Albert Ni,\u00a0Pieter Walraven (who founded now Google-owned Pie<\/a>),\u00a0Juha Paananen (who sold Nonstop Games to King.com<\/a>),\u00a0Royston Tay (who sold Zopim to Zendesk<\/a>) and\u00a0Bowei Lee,\u00a0CEO of LCY Chemical Corp.<\/p>\n

We first wrote about Saleswhale<\/a> last August\u00a0while it was in the Y Combinator program in the U.S., and since then the team has returned to Singapore and developed the business. Its product, called Engage<\/a>, allows companies to set up virtual email accounts which send communicate with sales prospects\u00a0the same way a human employee would.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t a full on sales team replacement at this point,\u00a0rather it is focused on handling inbound leads or reigniting stale prospects.\u00a0The AIs can use charts, figures and PDFs and when a\u00a0lead becomes warm again they can hand it over to a designated employee to take things further.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Engage is available for a base rate fee, after which additional cost comes per usuage. There\u2019s a free 14-day trial to allow new users to test the product without that initial commitment, but Saleswhale has removed the free usage option it had in place last year, co-founder\u00a0Gabriel Lim confirmed.\u00a0The company isn\u2019t saying how much revenue it pulls in, but Lim said that base fees account for around 40 percent of income with activity-based fees representing the rest.<\/p>\n

Lim founded the company last year with fellow Singaporeans Venus Wong and Ethan Le in response to\u00a0the frustration of the repetitive nature of training new sales staff, many of whom move on to new jobs. The team has since added two engineers to its ranks, and Lim said it plans to hire another three people who will cover sales and also more engineers. The current team are all engineers, so adding a dedicated sales team makes plenty of sense for the business now that it is maturing.<\/p>\n

Most of the customer leads that Saleswhale itself gets are inbound, and mainly\u00a0from tech startups, but Lim said the company has begun to hold initial discussions with firms in verticals such as real estate and automotive loans to diversify. But, right now, he told TechCrunch, the company has a \u201chuge backlog\u201d of interested customers that it is onboarding to its platform, which already counts \u201cdozens\u201d of paying customers. While he didn\u2019t give\u00a0specific names, Lim said that,\u00a0since February 2017, Saleswhale has helped its customers close $130,000 in deals with a further $1.5 million-worth of leads in the pipeline.<\/p>\n

This seed money will go towards\u00a0those expansion and hiring efforts. Lim said the company will\u00a0look to close a Series A round in around\u00a012 months. Interestingly, this investment is a first seed deal for Monks\u2019 Hill Ventures, the $80 million fund that is primarily focused on Series A\u00a0companies<\/a>, so Saleswhale may already have a major contributor to its next round depending on how things go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\" Saleswhale, a Singapore-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to let\u00a0companies automate their sales emails, has raised a $1.2 million seed round. The capital was provided by VC firms Monk’s Hill Ventures, Gree Ventures and Wavemaker Partners with a number of angel investors. Those include early Dropbox hire Albert Ni,\u00a0Pieter Walraven (who founded now Google-owned… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

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