People.ai, a startup that has developed an AI-based predictive tool for sales managers, has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, TechCrunch reports. The startup will use the funding to scale out its product and sales teams, and engage in more enterprise-focused R&D.
Index Ventures and Shasta Ventures also participated in the round, alongside existing investors Y Combinator and SV Angel.
Launched in 2016 by serial entrepreneur Oleg Roginskyy, People.ai initially aimed to build an AI that would help automate sales operations as a function. Since then, the company has refocused on solving this same problem but with an eye on the enterprise, Roginskyy told TechCrunch.
“There are many companies building out features related to conversational AI like Chorus.ai and VoiceOps. People.ai sees these companies as data sources, but that their own solution is the backbone that reads all types of sales activity,” notes the US tech blog.
Last year, as reported by Ukraine Digital News, People.ai secured a pre-seed round of funding from Garage Technology Ventures — one of the most established venture funds in Silicon Valley — as well as from a bevy of US and Ukrainian business angels.
Among these business angels were Ben Boyer, Nick Bilogorskiy, Samuel Kwok, Kevin Mahaffey, Yevgen Sysoyev, and others. The total amount of the investment was not been disclosed, but Ukrainian tech blog AIN learned that the business angels contributed no less than $450,000 to the round.
