There are an increasing number of gifts from AI Note Takers who transcribe calls and provide action items. Shiro wants to do the same for salespeople who are on the ground and face to face with their customers.
The company announced Wednesday that it had secured $50 million in the Series B round led by SignalFire with participation from Dick Costolo and Adam Bain's VC Firm 01 Advisors. Square CPO Saumil Mehta; Founders of Business Management Software Squire Songelaron and Dave Salvant. Former YELP SVP of Engineering Michael Stopman. Previous Snap Engineering VP Ding Zhou also participated.
So far, Siro has raised a total of $75 million.
Founder Jake Cronin's idea of Shiro came from his university experience. For the summer he had the option of working at an amusement park or selling kitchen knives from Door Tour Ardoor. He chose the latter and made good money from there. The following year he hired other sales representatives and opened an office to sell knives. However, he realized he couldn't be on the ground to help coach all junior reps.
Jake Cronin, founder of SIRO.ImageCredit: Siro
A few years later, after working for McKinsey, Cronin began building Siro. I coded the core products myself.
“When I was running a knife sales office, I realized that a lot of the sales work is manual and good software can have a lot of value,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. “The more I researched sales, the more I thought the biggest opportunity here wasn't about enriching data or managing customer relationships, but that's about improving the lives of salespeople on the ground.”
Siro transcribes sales meetings via the app. Features include a company-wide dashboard where salespeople can submit successful calls, sort them by engagement from peers, and other reps can listen to top calls and gain insight into improving ground sales visits.
Image credit: SIRO
Cronin said Siro is training vertical models for certain industries. For example, in HVAC sales coaching. The company also uses a holistic purpose model to assess how salespeople build trust and handle rejections.
SignalFire partner Wayne Hu said VC companies always want to invest in companies with a strong business advantage in data in a particular segment.
“SIRO solutions will help digitize the 'dark matter' of offline conversations, including field sales efforts. This broadly expands the vertical and depth of downstream actions that can be calculated from this data, such as customer and product insights, and expands customer and product insights,” he told TechCrunch in an email.