SiftHub, an AI startup founded by former CTO and LogiNext co-founder Manisha Raisinghani, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding to build an AI assistant. This is intended to free up sales and pre-sales teams to focus on building relationships. With a monotonous job.
The company's generative AI assistants can handle most of the non-sales activities that sales reps have to handle, such as entering data into CRM systems, submitting requests for proposals (RFPs), researching customer information, and creating presentation materials. The target is SiftHub integrates with information sources like Google Drive, Slack, Zendesk, HubSpot, and Salesforce, allowing sales and presales teams to complete information security surveys, vendor evaluation forms, and submit RFPs and information just by talking to the AI assistant. You can submit a request for information (RFI) form. . The assistant is available as a bot, Microsoft add-in, Chrome plugin, and web app through Slack and Microsoft Teams, and supports his 10 languages, including Spanish and German.
“When salespeople sell to businesses, they should spend more time building relationships, which directly impacts sales,” Raisinghani told TechCrunch. “Not having to hire as many pre-sales people to do detailed technical work saves time and impacts the bottom line,” she told TechCrunch.
SiftHub's AI Assistant is built on open-source Large Language Models (LLM) and Search Augmented Generation (RAG), which uses additional data sources to fine-tune the quality of AI-generated content. Supported by technology. By using RAG on LLM, SiftHub can limit hallucinations. Illusions are a common problem in generative AI where the system produces inaccurate or misleading results. The startup also uses cross-encoders to prevent the platform from selecting the wrong information from a particular knowledge base. A cross-encoder analyzes two queries simultaneously instead of examining them separately to provide a more accurate answer.
“We think it's better not to give an answer than to give a wrong answer,” Raisinghani said. The founder added that while SiftHub's system may return 5% fewer answers, he is confident that at least 75% of the AI's answers are correct.
SiftHub also uses “smart search algorithms” that take into account the recency of documents and knowledge sources to uncover relevant and recent information, Raisinghani said.
After more than a decade at LogiNext, Raisinghani realized the need for a solution like SiftHub in 2022 while advising blockchain startup Polygon Labs on its enterprise go-to-market strategy. She found that finding information about Polygon was a difficult task because the data was stored across multiple platforms and was not available through a single channel. Sales and presales personnel need a lot of information about their company and its business operations when contacting potential customers. Finding information from various sources, such as your company's Slack channel and other unorganized documents, can be a time-consuming and tedious task.
She then spoke to about 200 users to better understand the problem and categorize user responses into different use cases. All of this eventually shifted her focus to the sales and pre-sales teams.
“Sales teams have behind-the-scenes teams like pre-sales teams and solution engineers, who are typically the unsung heroes of an organization. They do everything from submitting RFPs to answering customer questions. We are doing a lot of technical work until we find the ,” she explained. “If you can save time in both sales and pre-sales, your sales reps will automatically have more time to spend building relationships.”
Since generative AI has become popular, the AI startup market focused on sales and pre-sales operations has gained momentum over the past year. Companies ranging from giants like Salesforce, Zoom, and Google to startups like his Quilt, People.ai, and Darwin AI are building tools powered by his GenAI to help sales reps complete everyday forms. It allows you to simplify a wide range of tasks such as composing, drafting emails, etc. Enter public information about your customers into your CRM, create copies, and get recommendations on which leads are likely to buy or cancel.
However, Raisinghani believes SiftHub has unique advantages because it sits deep within the customer's business workflow and can solve the entire sales response problem, unlike “wrappers around OpenAI and other LLMs.” Masu.
The startup also relies on Raisinghani's own experience scaling startups and a team of 15 people, including former entrepreneurs. “If I'm going to dedicate at least 10 years of my life to something, I want to make sure that for the next 10 years I'm excited and that I believe in it wholeheartedly,” she said. The company is headquartered in the United States and has a research and development team in Mumbai, India.
The funds will be used to hire more people in product research and development, enhance products and help bring the company to market. The seed round was co-led by Matrix Partners India and Blume Ventures, with participation from Neon Fund as well as executives and founders from Superhuman, Cloudflare, DevRev, RazorPay, and SuperOps.
SiftHub will initially target B2B companies selling to mid-market and enterprise customers with revenue between $50 million and $500 million. The AI assistant is currently available to a small number of users for initial feedback, but the startup is planning a “full-scale launch” later this year.
“Buyers are getting smarter and approaching sales by asking more sophisticated questions later in the buying process.As a result, expectations from sales teams have also changed.To be successful, you need advanced products Sales and pre-sales teams lack the tools they need to cope with this new sales environment. We use AI to improve product knowledge. We are excited about SiftHub’s vision to help customers manage their sales and enable sales to focus on relationships,” said Pranay Desai, Partner, Matrix Partners India, in a prepared statement.
“SiftHub is Manisha's second venture in the SaaS space. Armed with over 10 years of entrepreneurial experience and an impressive track record, Manisha and her team are committed to creating innovative AI that transforms the entire sales and pre-sales process. We are excited to support the SiftHub team and join them on their ambitious journey,” said Sanjay Nath, Partner at Blume Ventures.