Civil, a startup that's building an AI assistant for salespeople, announced Wednesday that it has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Greycroft.
The market for sales AI assistants is getting crowded as companies leverage generative AI and large-scale language models to help salespeople automate tedious tasks like filling out requests for proposals and updating internal databases.
But what sets the company's assistant apart, Civil says, is its ability to track and analyze numerous call logs and emails, providing contextual insights and summaries rather than just meeting notes and transcripts for one or two calls.The startup also targets salespeople, rather than sales leaders, to grow its customer base, a strategy that has allowed the company to penetrate the market quickly (more on that below).
“If the AI's outputs are not accurate, people will quickly lose trust in the system,” Gorish Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Civil, said in an interview.
Civil said it built an in-house search augmented generative (RAG) pipeline on top of its existing generative AI GPT models to provide sales-specific results. The startup uses the RAG model to analyze calls, emails, and messages between buyers and sellers, taking additional signals into account when providing the output. This deal-level analysis helps limit prediction inaccuracies, Agarwal said.
Sybill's AI promises to take on much of the repetitive, manual work involved in sales calls by recording the sales conversation, providing call summaries, drafting follow-up emails based on the seller's writing style and providing context around the call, updating fields in CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot, and automatically summarizing budgets, buyers, competition, buying process and other relevant information (frameworks like BANT, MEDDICC, SPICED, etc.) and making all that information available to sales leaders.
Sybill competes with sales-specific tools like Gong and Chrous.ai, as well as transcription tools like Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, and Zoom.
But Agarwal believes there's a key element that sets the startup apart: “They're built as tools, not assistants like we are,” he says. “An assistant is someone to delegate an entire task to, as opposed to a tool that ingests data and spits out insights. We're also building end-to-end workflows to solve use cases like note-taking from calls, CRM inputs, follow-ups, etc.”
Agarwal told TechCrunch that he met co-founder Nishit Asnani while in graduate school at Stanford University. A year later, Civil co-founder and CTO Soumyaarka Mondal, who previously worked at Confluent, Morgan Stanley and Salesforce, and Ghorish's sister Mehak Agarwal, who led AI development as a researcher at Harvard and MIT, joined the company.
Word of mouth is effective
Founded in 2020, Civil is set to scale from $100,000 to $1 million in ARR in 2023 within nine months, with most of that coming from referrals, Agarwal said. He told TechCrunch that nearly 60% to 70% of new customers and new revenue come from direct referrals or from users who switch jobs and bring Civil to their new company.
Agarwal said the startup already has over 500 paying clients (teams) across more than 30 countries, with the majority in the US, Canada, Australia, UK and India.
According to the CEO, the technology slowdown has helped startups grow as companies look to cut costs and streamline business processes.
“Sybill helps salespeople save more than five hours each week, gives management an accurate view of what's going on, and improves the efficiency of the sales process,” he said.
The Series A round brings the company's total funding since its founding in 2020 to $14.5 million. Existing investors Neotribe Ventures, Powerhouse Ventures and Uncorrelated Ventures also participated in the round. The company did not disclose its valuation.
The company plans to use the new funding to further develop its AI assistant and hire more staff: Civil currently has 30 employees, with plans to grow to around 40 by the end of the year.