Defy is a seed-stage venture fund focused on emerging high-potential opportunities. It is driven by a passion for working closely with entrepreneurs, especially through the transformative time after seed funding. The firm invests in people and in their conviction and talent for creating real change. Defy was founded in 2016 by Neil Sequeira and Trae Vassallo and is based in San Mateo, California, United States.

Defy.vc

Ridge Ventures funds experienced founders redefining how the world interacts with software.    Whether for the cloud or the edge, we look for companies delivering advanced technologies, new distribution models and incredible user experiences to market.    While we’re focused on SaaS and infrastructure solutions for the enterprise, we also back startups in adtech, gaming and ecommerce.    We are firm believers in “where there’s a big problem, there’s a big opportunity.”  We love Series A deals and helping create something out of chaos.

Ridge Ventures

Firebolt Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. The firm focuses on early-stage and seed-stage investments in companies that operate within the industries involved with digital media, mobile, software, e-commerce, and information technology. Moreover, the firm takes an algorithmic approach to investing. Firebolt Ventures was started in 2014 by Cherian Mathew.

Firebolt Ventures

Aircover.ai

Aircover leverages GenAI for live sales calls. It uplevels your reps with in-the-moment guidance for positioning, process, technical product features, and more.  Don’t leave promising accounts stalled and uncommitted while your rep tracks down details. Give everyone direct access to effective messaging and instant technical depth on every call, and better account direction afterwards. Aircover is built for sales changemakers and reformers—enablement leaders, sales managers, and RevOps teams—who see a path to higher revenue through greater rep efficiency using AI.  Don’t leave promising accounts stalled and uncommitted while your rep tracks down details. Give direct access to effective messaging and instant technical depth on every call. Follow up consistently with better account direction afterwards. Your go-to-market teams are ready for reform. Equip them better with in-game assistance.

Aircover is a conversational intelligence platform that provides real-time tools for sales teams. The platform provides a real-time AI sales assistant that increases team productivity during customer meetings. It provides live insights and coaching by integrating with existing video conferencing tools (Zoom, Google Meet), automatically transcribing conversations, and generating formatted meeting notes, action items, and summaries. Aircover empowers sales teams by providing just-in-time activation, automating administrative tasks, and ensuring consistent messaging.&nbsp;

Artificial intelligence is helping sales teams manage relationships and optimize the customer lifecycle.

Sales Engagement Platforms

Aircover is a sale assistant tool that leverages conversational AI and real-time technologies to enhance the efficiency of sales teams. The platform integrates with virtual meetings, providing sales representatives with up-to-date messaging and positioning information. This approach aims to reduce ramp time for new representatives and products, shorten sales cycles, and increase win rates. Aircover's AI-powered system enforces best practices throughout sales meetings, offering real-time answers to representatives and potentially reducing the number of follow-up meetings required per prospect. The tool is designed to serve a wide range of users, from individuals to large enterprises. Aircover also features a relationship management component, allowing users to store notes and track roles within deals. By putting sales enablement on autopilot, the platform seeks to streamline the sales process and improve overall performance.

Aircover

Real-time AI Sales Assistant

Using AI to mimic and understand human language

Natural Language Processing Tools

Aircover raises a $3M seed round from Defy Partners

Aircover is a conversational intelligence platform that provides real-time tools for sales teams. The platform provides a real-time AI sales assistant that increases team productivity during customer meetings. It provides live insights and coaching by integrating with existing video conferencing tools (Zoom, Google Meet), automatically transcribing conversations, and generating formatted meeting notes, action items, and summaries. Aircover empowers sales teams by providing just-in-time activation, automating administrative tasks, and ensuring consistent messaging.&nbsp;Key customers and partnerships&nbsp;As of August 2024, its customers include Cloudflare, GitLab, Equifax, and Fortune 1000 Cyber Security.&nbsp;

Outreach is a sales execution platform designed to optimize and enhance sales processes across organizations. Its technology leverages AI and data-driven insights to improve sales performance, streamline workflows, and improve productivity. Its suite of solutions includesSales Engagement: Outreach provides tools to structure and automate sales outreach, ensuring that sales reps send timely, relevant messages to the right peopleDeal Management: The platform simplifies deal management by helping sales teams track deal progress, spot potential risks, and identify the best actions to maintain momentum and close dealsPipeline Management: Outreach offers comprehensive pipeline management features, including advanced forecasting and modeling capabilities to predict revenue needs and build more accurate forecastsConversation Intelligence: Powered by Kaia, a voice-based AI sales assistant, this feature analyzes sales conversations to provide actionable insights and coachingRep Coaching: Outreach supports real-time coaching by identifying skill gaps and providing feedback, which helps in enhancing the effectiveness of sales reps and aligning their activities with best practicesDeal Insights: The platform provides detailed insights into deal performance, helping sales teams understand why deals are won or lost and what actions are needed to increase success ratesMutual Action Plans: Outreach facilitates the creation of mutual action plans that align the sales team and the customer on the next steps, ensuring a clear path to closing dealsSales Forecasting: The platform uses AI to generate accurate sales forecasts, helping teams better plan and allocate resources based on predictive data and historical trends.The platform integrates with popular customer relationship management (CRM) platforms such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and LeanData. The company is deeply integrated with third-party apps to attract large enterprise customers and has a network of 1,200+ partners.&nbsp;Outreach's machine learning model claims to predict deal closure with 81% accuracy and recommends actions to keep deals on track by analyzing unique engagement signals from emails, calls, and meetings.The company also opted to bolster its product offering by acquiring revenue intelligence platform Canopy.io in October 2021. With this acquisition, Outreach strengthens its sales analytics and forecasting capabilities. Canopy.io will be the foundation of “Outreach Commit,” a new forecasting tool under Outreach’s suite of products. Key customers and partnershipsAs of August 2024, the platform served more than 6,000 companies, including Zoom, Databricks, ELSEVIER, Okta, and Siemens.In March 2023, the company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17465?industryIds=27">expanded its partnership with Snowflake, </a>a data platform, to introduce a new offering called “Outreach Data Sharing,” which enables organizations to connect Outreach's datasets with other enterprise data and improve sales cycle.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Outreach

Salesloft is an AI-powered revenue orchestration platform designed to improve sales performance and pipeline management. Its technology focuses on guiding go-to-market teams with data-driven insights to optimize customer interactions and engagement. The company offers a suite of products and capabilities, including Cadence for pipeline building, Conversations for insights and coaching, Deals for pipeline management and forecasting, Forecast for predicting sales outcomes, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/12862">Rhythm</a> for task prioritization, and Drift for early engagement with in-market buyers.In February 2022, the company announced the launch of its four-tier <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8630">Technology Partner Program </a>to provide growth opportunities for its partner ecosystem. Additionally, Salesloft also announced the launch of its Market Development Fund, which aims to support the funding of partner programs and pipeline development and create awareness among the Salesloft ecosystem.&nbsp;Salesloft claims to help sales teams generate 322% more pipeline, advance and close deals 75% faster, and win 28% more deals using conversation intelligence.Salesloft has been active in the M&amp;A space. In July 2021, the company acquired InStereo, a sales strategy consulting firm. The acquisition of InStereo established Salesloft's focus on buyer engagement in sales and marketing campaigns. InStereo initially partnered with Salesloft in 2018 and had completed more than 150 client engagements for companies such as 3M (American multinational conglomerate), Cargill (global food company), and Pegasystems (American software company). In February 2024, the company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/27169">acquired Drift,</a> a conversational B2B marketing platform, to improve its customer journey orchestration tools for B2B sales teams. Key customers and partnershipsAs of August 2024, the platform served more than 5,000 customers, including Google, 3M, IBM, LinkedIn, Cisco, and Dell.In August 2022, the firm <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/12545">partnered with Highspot, </a>a sales coaching platform, to further streamline the client engagement process for sales teams.&nbsp;

Salesloft

People.ai is a revenue intelligence platform that uses AI-powered automation to help sales teams optimize their go-to-market (GTM) strategies by capturing and analyzing sales activities such as emails, meetings, and calls. People.ai's suite of solutions includes SalesAI for predictive insights, ClosePlan for deal qualification, and PeopleGlass for real-time visibility into account and opportunity activity, enabling teams to focus on the right accounts and buyers. The platform integrates with tools such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and Zoom to automate data collection and deliver accurate and enriched insights that improve sales efficiency and effectiveness.In May 2023, the firm <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18990">launched AccountGPT, </a>an AI-driven enhancement to its account planning application that leverages GenAI and large language models (LLMs) to automate sections of account plans, including market research, by extracting data from publicly available sources such as company websites and earnings reports.People.ai claims to capture 1.8 million sales activities per hour, achieve 92% forecast accuracy, and increase net new customer meetings by 25%.Key customers and partnershipsAs of August 2024, its customers include Cisco, Okta, Verizon, Zoom, Five9, and Pluralsight.In July 2022, the company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11924">partnered with integrated solution provider Oracle, </a>to use AI-powered sales automation tool "Oracle Fusion Sales" to support its sales process.

People.ai

Revenue.io (formerly RingDNA) is an AI-powered sales execution platform designed to increase sales team productivity and efficiency. The platform leverages GenAI and integrates <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/2055">Salesforce</a> to centralize and streamline sales workflows, automate key tasks, and deliver real-time guidance and insights. Key products includeRingDNA: An AI-powered dialer that improves sales workflows with features like click-to-call, voicemail drop, and call recording while automating tasks and providing real-time call guidanceConversation AI: This solution provides real-time coaching, transcribes and analyzes calls, automates follow-up emails, and builds libraries of best practices to improve sales performanceGuided Selling: Provides real-time guidance through the sales process, automates cadences, prioritizes leads, and delivers personalized playbooks to ensure best practices are followedCallerDNA: Tracks the source of inbound calls, captures data, and routes calls to the appropriate repsMoments: Delivers real-time agent assistance for sales and customer support, providing on-the-spot guidance, objection handling, and automated follow-up tasks.Revenue.io integrates with a range of popular solutions, including D&amp;B, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and HubSpot. Key customers and partnerships&nbsp;As of August 2024, its customers include Hewlett Packard, Amazon Web Services, Autodesk, SAP Concur, Lyft, and Twilio.

Revenue.io

Apollo.io (formerly known as ZenProspect) is a comprehensive sales platform that integrates sales intelligence and sales engagement functionalities. The platform’s products and services include&nbsp;1) Contact &amp; Account Search: Helps users find and qualify leads and companies using Apollo's Living Data Network to provide up-to-date B2B data on 275 million contacts and 73 million companies (as of August 2024)2) Scores &amp; Signals: Provides insights into lead engagement and company signals to prioritize outreach efforts3) Inbound Optimization: Enhances lead capture and qualification by optimizing inbound forms and processes4) Sales Engagement: Automates outbound sales activities, including email and phone outreach, to streamline prospecting and follow-ups5) Meetings: Assists in scheduling, preparing for, and following up on sales meetings6) Deal Management: Offers tools to manage and close deals with actionable insights and recommendations7) Conversation Intelligence: Records, tracks, and analyzes sales conversations to provide feedback and improve sales tactics8) Analytics: Provides detailed performance metrics to identify successful strategies and areas for improvement9) Coaching: Delivers actionable feedback to sales representatives to enhance their performance and effectiveness10) Workflow Engine: Automates repetitive tasks and processes to accelerate lead management and sales operations11) &nbsp;Enrich &amp; Cleanse: Syncs and enriches CRM data to maintain accuracy and completeness in customer information.The company was also a part of the Y Combinator (YC) Winter 2016 batch. Apollo.io generated USD 1 million in annual recurring revenue at YC and was profitable immediately. In August 2023, the company was valued at <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/21434">USD 1.6 billion.&nbsp;</a>Key customers and partnershipsAs of August 2024, Apollo.io had served more than 1 million users across 500,000 companies, including Stripe, Census, customer.io, DocuSign, and AUTODESK.&nbsp;

Apollo.io

All in one platform which offers a variety of tools for sales collaboration and for optimizing the entire sales process.

Tools for recording & analyzing live sales calls over voice & video.

Tools used for automating routine sales functions to improve the efficiency of sales teams.

Tools for preparing & automating sales campaigns via email, SMS & other channels.

Tools for discovering & building customer and company databases to generate sales leads.

Tools for discovering & analyzing customer interactions for improving customer success.

Tools for preparing sales content & coaching sales teams to improve performance.

Tools used to continuously  improve the product experience by understanding customer pain points.

Companies that use GenAI as a core part of their product offering for sales engagement

AI/ML solutions automate and streamline sales processes by providing insights

Sales engagement platforms use personalization to enhance the effectiveness of sales outreach

Uses GenAI for tasks like lead generation, content personalization, sales forecasting, and customer segmentation

Sales workflow automation platforms provide solutions for distributed sales teams

Aircover is a sale assistant tool that leverages conversational AI and real-time technologies to enhance the efficiency of sales teams. The platform integrates with virtual meetings, providing sales representatives with up-to-date messaging and positioning information. This approach aims to reduce ramp time for new representatives and products, shorten sales cycles, and increase win rates. Aircover's AI-powered system enforces best practices throughout sales meetings, offering real-time answers to representatives and potentially reducing the number of follow-up meetings required per prospect. The tool is designed to serve a wide range of users, from individuals to large enterprises. Aircover also features a relationship management component, allowing users to store notes and track roles within deals. By putting sales enablement on autopilot, the platform seeks to streamline the sales process and improve overall performance.

Reduct is a cloud-based video editing and storage platform that enables users to transcribe, organize, and edit video content through text-based interfaces. The platform uses automated transcription technology to convert video and audio files into searchable text transcripts. Users can then highlight, tag, and edit these transcripts to create video clips and reels. Reduct's key differentiator is its ability to edit video by manipulating the corresponding transcript text, allowing for efficient review and compilation of interview footage and other video content. The platform supports various file formats and integrates with video conferencing tools like Zoom for direct import of recordings. Reduct also offers collaborative features, allowing multiple team members to work on projects simultaneously. In addition to its core editing capabilities, Reduct provides unlimited cloud storage for video files, making it a comprehensive solution for video post-production workflows.
Key customers and partnerships
Reduct caters to a range of industries and professionals, including researchers, content creators, marketers, and corporate teams. The platform has developed integrations with popular video editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro, enabling users to export their Reduct projects as editable sequences in these applications. Reduct also supports Final Cut Pro through XML export.

Reduct

MonkeyLearn is an AI-powered text analysis and data visualization platform that enables businesses to extract insights from unstructured textual data. The platform offers both pre-built and custom machine learning models for tasks such as sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, topic detection, and intent classification. MonkeyLearn's no-code interface allows users to clean, label, and visualize customer feedback data without requiring programming skills. The platform can process various types of text data including customer reviews, surveys, social media posts, and support tickets. MonkeyLearn integrates with popular tools like Excel, Google Sheets, Zapier, and Zendesk, allowing users to connect their existing data sources. In 2023, MonkeyLearn launched an all-in-one text analysis and data visualization studio that provides instant insights with greater granularity. The platform offers customizable dashboards and templates for different business scenarios, enabling users to create visualizations tailored to their specific needs.

MonkeyLearn

Keatext is an AI-powered text analytics platform that specializes in interpreting customer feedback. The company's cloud-based solution synthesizes large volumes of unstructured feedback data from multiple channels, including open-survey questions, online reviews, support tickets, chats, and social media posts. Keatext's platform utilizes deep learning and natural language processing to analyze, cluster, correlate, and track customer opinions autonomously, providing actionable insights through a comprehensive dashboard.
The platform is designed to minimize response time and requires no setup, featuring multilingual analysis and context-sensitive, industry-agnostic understanding. It automatically visualizes correlations and trends, offering immediate report-sharing capabilities. Keatext's technology adapts to various industries without requiring algorithm customization, eliminating the need for keywords, lexicons, and semantic dictionaries.
Founded in 2010 by Narjès Boufaden, Keatext initially operated as a professional services provider. In 2015, the company transitioned to a product-based model with the launch of its cloud-based AI-powered text analytics platform. Keatext's solution helps businesses optimize profitability through customer feedback analysis, enabling them to move from assumption-based decision-making to data-driven, research-based strategies. The platform significantly reduces the time required for analyzing customer feedback, with users reporting that tasks that previously took eight hours can now be completed in 10 minutes using Keatext.

Keatext

NeuralSpace is an AI SaaS company that specializes in providing advanced text and voice AI technologies in over 100 languages. Founded in 2019, the company focuses on delivering language AI solutions, particularly for Arabic, Indian, and other low-resource languages predominantly spoken in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. NeuralSpace's platform offers a suite of products including speech-to-text, machine translation, entity recognition, transliteration, data generation, language detection, and text-to-speech conversion. The company's flagship product, VoiceAI, launched in October 2023, provides highly accurate call transcription, translation, and speech analytics for Arabic and Indian languages and dialects, achieving an average accuracy rate of 91%. NeuralSpace utilizes proprietary speech-to-text technology trained on a dataset of 40,000 hours of audio data, which it aims to increase to 100,000 hours. The company's no-code modular toolkit enables enterprises to train and deploy AI models for language processing applications without extensive coding knowledge. NeuralSpace's technology leverages modeling techniques such as transfer learning, multilingual learning, and data augmentation to work effectively with limited text or speech data. The platform can be accessed through a command-line interface, REST APIs, or a no-code GUI, making it versatile for various integration needs.

NeuralSpace

Solutions that use techniques such as named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, or summarization to produce insights from unstructured textual documents.

Platforms that summarize conversations, audio, or video files including reactions into text formats.

Tools to identify and analyze the opinions or emotions expressed in survey responses or reviews to produce actionable insights.

Platforms that decipher search queries by analyzing structured and unstructured data based on user intent and behavior.

Solutions that enable real-time conversation through chatbots or automate ticket routing to relevant agents.

Tools that automatically translate text from one language to another.

Tools that detect plagiarism, punctuation errors, or style errors in text.

Companies that use GenAI as a core part of their product offering for natural language processing.

NLP tools such as chatbots are used to cater to each individual

NLP tools are built using AI/ML technologies

Some NLP tools are built using foundation models

NLP tools are provided for other companies to integrate into their workflows

Aircover

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