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Sybill raises $11 million to fund an AI assistant, which lessens the administrative load on salespeople

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A firm called Sybill, which created an AI assistant especially for salespeople, announced on Wednesday that it had raised $11 million in a Series A funding round headed by Greycroft.

As businesses have used big language models and generative AI to help salespeople automate tedious tasks like filling out requests for bids and updating internal databases, the market for sales AI assistants has become rather saturated.

But according to Sybill, what makes its assistant unique is its capacity to keep track of and evaluate a large number of emails and call transcripts. This allows it to offer summaries and insights that are driven by context rather than just meeting notes and the transcripts of a few calls. In order to increase its customer base, the business is also focusing on salespeople rather than sales leadership, a tactic that has allowed it to enter the market swiftly.

Gorish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Sybill, stated in an interview that “people lose trust in the system very, very quickly if the AI output is not accurate.”

In order to provide sales-specific results, Sybill claims to have constructed an internal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline on top of the company’s current generative AI GPT models. Using its RAG models, the startup evaluates messages, emails, and calls between the vendor and the buyer in order to provide output that takes extra signals into account. According to Aggarwal, this deal-level analysis helps reduce prediction errors.

The majority of the repetitive, physical labor involved in sales calls should be handled by Sybill’s AI. It captures sales talks, summarizes the discussion, composes a follow-up email according to the salesperson’s writing style, and offers background information on the call. Additionally, it can automatically summarize the budget, buyer, competition, buying process, and other pertinent information (frameworks like BANT, MEDDICC, and SPICED) and make all of that information available to sales leadership. CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot can also be updated with this information.

Sybill’s competitors include transcription tools such as Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, and Zoom, as well as sales-specific solutions like Gong and Chorus.ai.

However, Aggarwal believes that one key component distinguishes his startup: “These are built like tools, not like an assistant, which is what we’re doing,” he declared.“An assistant is someone you delegate entire tasks to, which is different from a tool that ingests some data and spits out insights. We also build end-to-end workflows to solve use cases like notetaking from calls, CRM entry and follow-ups.”

Aggarwal said that he attended Stanford University’s graduate program when he first met Nishit Asnani, his co-founder. A year later, Soumyarka Mondal, the sister of Gorish Aggarwal, who had previously served as a research fellow and oversaw AI development at Harvard University and MIT, as well as Mehak Aggarwal, who had worked at Confluent, Morgan Stanley, and Salesforce, joined them.

Word-of-mouth marketing is effective

Established in 2020, Sybill increased its annual revenue from $100,000 to $1 million in just nine months in 2023, according to Aggarwal, with the majority of that growth reportedly coming from referrals. According to him, TechCrunch was informed that between 60% and 70% of its new clients and income originate from either direct recommendations or from users who transfer jobs and integrate Sybill into their new business.

According to Aggarwal, the business has already attracted more than 500 paying clients, or teams. Although these clients come from more than 30 countries, the U.S., Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and India account for the bulk of them.

The CEO claims that as businesses looked to save expenses and streamline procedures, the IT slowdown aided the startup’s expansion.

“Sybill helps their seller save more than 5 hours every week, helps management get true visibility into what’s going on, and improves the sales process efficiency,” he stated.

With the Series A round, the company has raised $14.5 million in total since its founding in 2020. Participating in the round were existing investors Neotribe Ventures, Powerhouse Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures. The startup withheld its valuation from the public.

The business plans to employ more people and develop its AI helper further with the additional funds. Sybill currently employs 30 people, but by the end of the year, she hopes to have roughly 40.

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The OpenAI Startup Fund raises $44 million in its biggest-to-date SPV

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In a recent financial filing, the OpenAI Startup Fund, the company’s early-stage AI investor, revealed that it has raised more than $44 million for its fifth Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which is the largest one to date.

The Fund was established in 2021 and has a unique structure. Despite claiming that OpenAI is not an investor, it uses the OpenAI name. According to its website, it has raised funds from outside LPs, including Microsoft, a significant OpenAI sponsor, and “other OpenAI partners,” after being legally controlled by OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman at first. Earlier this year, Altman relinquished legal control to Ian Hathaway, his general partner.

VCs usually employ SPVs to invest outside of their primary fund and aggregate investor funds. The fund, however, has not disclosed the precise purpose of these monies.

This SPV “will be used to support a variety of existing portfolio companies and to make new investments,” an OpenAI representative told TechCrunch.

“SPVs allow us to allocate capital to high-potential investments opportunistically.”

This year, the fund, which was established in 2021, has disclosed five different vehicles totaling $114.2 million, continuing its impressive SPV streak:

Its website is minimal, with its most current news being published a year ago, despite the bustle of activity. The website only lists a small number of its investments, such as the AI note-taking software Mem and the legal AI business Harvey.

But contrary to what its website suggests, the fund is more active. Thrive Health, an AI health venture involving Sam Altman and Ariana Huffington, and the warm outbound business Unify are noteworthy investments this year.

Due to its AI code assistant Cursor, Anysphere is presently engaged in a VC bidding war, and the fund is also a seed investor in the company.

The Fund’s initial capital of $175.25 million, which was raised back in October 2021, is the sum of all these SPVs.

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Zopper, an Insurtech Company, Raises $25 Million in a Round Sponsored by Elevation Capital and Dharana Capital

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Zopper, an insurtech firm, announced in a note today that it has raised $25 million in a new round of funding led by Elevation Capital and Dharana Capital.

Dharana Capital has supported companies like NoBroker and Urban Company, while Elevation Capital is an active investor in the Indian fintech ecosystem.

The financing also included Blume Ventures, an existing investor. Other investors in Zopper include Creaegis, Bessemer Venture Partners, and ICICI Venture. To date, the business has raised a total of $96 million in equity investment.

The business from Noida will utilize the money to improve its insurance distribution network and expand its digital technology infrastructure. Additionally, the funds will improve Zopper’s device and appliance protection businesses’ post-sales and maintenance capabilities and speed up the expansion of the company’s current bancassurance products. The method used to sell insurance products through banking channels is known as the bancassurance model.

Banks and other businesses can use Zopper’s technology stack to package and market insurance products to their clients.

The company claimed in a statement that it presently has over 2,500 ecosystem actors and 40 insurance providers as partners.

At the moment, Zopper offers customized insurance solutions for consumers in India by integrating them into the ecosystem’s current digital channels.

“We are here to transform and automate the insurance distribution model in India, effectively, strategically and keeping customers in mind. We are mission-focused as a team. If we get this right, it will be transformational for the ecosystem and the country,” stated Mayank Gupta, Zopper’s chief operating officer.

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Amazon Invests an additional $4 Billion in the AI Firm Anthropic

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As the e-commerce behemoth competes with Big Tech rivals to profit from generative artificial intelligence technology, Amazon.com (AMZN.O.) opened a new tab and invested an additional $4 billion in OpenAI opponent Anthropic.

Amazon’s stake in the company famed for its GenAI chatbot Claude has doubled, but it is still a minority investor, the business announced on Friday. Like Amazon’s prior $4 billion investment, it is made in installments, starting at $1.3 billion and taking the form of convertible notes.

According to sources who asked not to be named in order to discuss private topics, Anthropic is also in discussions with other investors in order to raise more money with Amazon’s support.

Amazon, which has steadily become Anthropic’s main cloud partner, is in intense competition with Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) to provide AI-powered tools for its cloud clients. As a major distributor of its most recent models, AWS is generating a substantial amount of revenue for Anthropic.

“The investment in Anthropic is essential for Amazon to stay in a leadership position in AI,” Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, stated.

The increased investment by the e-commerce giant in Anthropic highlights the billions of dollars that have been invested in AI startups in the past year as investors seek to profit from the technology’s surge in popularity following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.

Last month, Microsoft-backed OpenAI collected $6.6 billion from investors, potentially valuing the company at $157 billion and solidifying its place among the world’s most valuable private enterprises.

Anthropic intends to use Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and implement its core models. Securing expensive AI chips is a big concern for startups since the rigorous process of training AI models demands powerful processors.

“It (partnership) also allows Amazon to promote its AI services such as leveraging its AI chips for training and inferencing, which Anthropic is using,” Luria stated.

Amazon is one of the many so-called hyperscaler clients of Nvidia (NVDA.O), which opens a new tab and presently controls the market for AI chips.

However, through its Annapurna Labs branch, which Anthropic stated it was “working closely with” to help create CPUs, Amazon has been striving to develop its own chips. Additionally, Amazon has been working on developing its own AI model, code-named “Olympus,” which it has not yet made public.

Anthropic, which was co-founded by brothers Dario and Daniela Amodei, former executives at OpenAI, said last year that it had obtained a $500 million investment from Alphabet, which pledged to contribute an additional $1.5 billion over time.

The startup’s operations also make advantage of Alphabet’s Google Cloud capabilities.

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