A year ago, Arjun Pillai was in a comfortable and important role as chief data officer at B2B database company ZoomInfo, but the serial entrepreneur was getting restless.
He's already launched and sold two startups, including Insent, which was acquired by ZoomInfo in 2021. “When you launch a startup, the heat is with you,” he told TechCrunch. Shortly after ChatGPT was released, he was ready to launch his third. After more than a decade of running startups and working in sales tech, he was convinced that generative AI could help make technical sales faster and more effective. “I couldn't wait. I had to launch the company right away.”
In August 2023, Pillai left ZoomInfo to start virtual sales engineer DocketAI, which on Thursday announced it had raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Mayfield and Foundation Capital.
While working at ZoomInfo, Pillai noticed that sales engineers, who are technical sales experts, were drawn into a variety of conversations with prospects, including some that didn't require their expertise. Many account executives would ask sales engineers complex, but rather routine questions. “Having a sales engineer on every call is expensive, highly inefficient, and time-consuming,” Pillai says.
So Pillai saw an opportunity to build an AI version of a sales engineer: Docket AI, which helps non-technical sales reps answer technical questions quickly and assists in creating requests for proposals (RFPs) and other technical documentation.
DocketAI won't replace sales engineers, but it will free up their time to work on “more interesting, complex and strategic enterprise deals,” Pillai said.
The startup's AI works by consolidating, ingesting, and indexing data from the more than 100 applications used by Docket's software clients. Pillai emphasized that the company doesn't train its AI on enterprise data. Docket acts as a search engine for structured and unstructured workplace data, similar to Glean and Atlassian's Rovo.
But Dockett's AI is different in that it also learns from the behavior of top salespeople, Pillai said.
“We don't just give facts to buyers,” Pillai says. “Dockett has the ability to learn from top sellers and spread best practices across the company.”
Pillai claims that sales organizations that use Docket see increased productivity and win rates.
The company has been actively marketing its product since the beginning of the year and is currently adding several new enterprise-level paying customers each month.
“Our smallest customer has 15 seats and our largest has 10,000 seats,” Pillai said, adding that the list also includes ZoomInfo and Demandbase.