Y Combinator is a startup accelerator that invests in a large number of startups twice a year. It created a new model for funding startups. Twice a year, the company invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups. The startup accelerator works intensively with the companies for three months, to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors. Each cycle culminates in Demo Day when the startups present their companies to a carefully selected, invite-only audience.

Y Combinator

Entrepreneur First is the place where the ambitious come together to build globally important technology companies. Through our platform running in 6 cities across 3 continents, we invest in high-potential individuals to help them meet their co-founder, develop their ideas and secure funding from leading investors in the shortest possible time.   We have built over 300 companies from scratch; have over 5000 alumni worldwide; and our portfolio is valued at over $5bn. EF companies include Tractable (Computer Vision, currently valued at $1bn as of June 2021), Magic Pony Technology (AI, acquired by Twitter for a reported $150m), Represent (social commerce, acquired by CustomInk), BloomsburyAI (acquired by Facebook), Cleo (fintech), OpenCosmos (space), CloudNC (manufacturing), Transcelestial (satellite communications) and many more. We're backed by some of the world's best tech founders and investors, including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, Demis Hassabis (Google Deepmind) and Taavet Hinrikus (Wise). For more information about Entrepreneur First, visit www.joinef.com.

Entrepreneur First

Beyond Capital Fund is an evergreen impact investment fund that invests in for-profit, early-stage companies in East Africa and India. The fund invests in companies that aim to improve access to health care, sanitation, clean energy, agriculture and food security, and financial inclusion, all of which can help consumers at the bottom of the economic pyramid live better lives. Despite the fact that the fund seeks market-rate financial returns, Beyond Capital is structured as a nonprofit, allowing the organization to emphasize fidelity to its social mission alongside its financial mandate. Beyond Capital, headquartered in New York, was established in 2009.

Beyond Capital

Gaingels is a venture investment syndicate in service of the LGBT+ community and its allies, investing in companies with LGBT+ founders and C-suite leaders at all stages of growth, as well as in more established companies resolved on building more inclusive teams, with a global portfolio of 130+ companies and $70M in deployed investment capital to date.  The Gaingels network also actively supports its portfolio in identifying and recruiting diverse talent to their C-suite and board leadership teams and fosters a vibrant global community of industry leaders, investors, operators, and entrepreneurs who share a common goal for positive social change through business and successful investments.

Gaingels

ThinKuvate is an early-stage startup investment firm incorporated in Singapore, and with interests and investors in Singapore, India, South Africa, and Australia. Its focus is on B2B + B2B2C Start-Ups including Health-Tech, Fintech, IoT, AI-ML, consumer-tech, and marketing tech. It is open to ideas outside of these industries if the idea passes our evaluation process. The company was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Singapore.

ThinKuvate

SenseAI Ventures is an artificial intelligence venture fund that provides solutions to the AI founders to lead a successful business.

SenseAI Ventures

Endurance Capital provides funding assistance and management to small and medium-sized companies. It searches and invests on undervalued and consumer-driven businesses. Endurance Capital is based in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.

Endurance Capital

Piper Serica Angel Fund invests in the startups and converting them into highly successful companies.

Piper Serica Angel Fund

Floworks

We provide a natural language interface on conversation apps like Slack, Teams and Gmail for users to connect with their work applications like CRMs, ERPs, project management tools, emails and calenders. Users can now get any thing done on these apps by just taking to them in plain english.

<div>Floworks is an Indo-US sales workflow automation platform that offers Flowy, a generative-AI-powered virtual assistant. The virtual assistant reads, updates, and retrieves information for sales reps, providing streamlined communication, lead tracking, and automated task management. Floworks integrates with popular platforms such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Salesforce, Hubspot, and Slack, allowing users to update CRMs, compose emails, and schedule meetings.</div>

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

Sales Engagement Platforms

<div>
 
 Floworks is an Indo-US sales workflow automation platform that offers Flowy, a generative-AI-powered virtual assistant. The virtual assistant reads, updates, and retrieves information for sales reps, providing streamlined communication, lead tracking, and automated task management. Floworks integrates with popular platforms such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Salesforce, Hubspot, and Slack, allowing users to update CRMs, compose emails, and schedule meetings.
 
 
 The firm claims to understand nuanced language and context better than any other chatbot through its natural language interface.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 The platform launched in beta in March 2023 with 10 customers. It planned to add more workspace and messaging tools and grow to 100 customers by 2024.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In August 2023, Flowork raised 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/22259">
 USD 1.5 million in a seed funding
 </a>
 round led by Y Combinator and Sense AI to onboard channel partners, expand its customer base, and further invest in product development. It also reported annual recurring revenue (ARR) of ~USD 250,000.
 
</div>

<div>
 
 Outreach is a sales intelligence platform that offers a suite of tools to help sales reps improve communication with prospects and close deals. The platform integrates with existing customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and provides sales sequences, personalization tools, and multi-channel communication capabilities. The company is deeply integrated with third-party apps to attract large enterprise customers and claims to have a network of around 1,000 partners. As of June 2021, the platform served more than 4,800 companies, with the majority being mid-market tech companies in North America. It opened its London office in February 2020 to further establish a presence in the European market, which represents around 5% of its customer base.&nbsp; As of June 2021, the company has more than 800 employees globally across Seattle, San Francisco, and new global offices in London and Prague.&nbsp;
 
 
 The platform offers insights on the most effective content channels and the optimal times to contact prospects using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology. Further, managers can track sales rep and team-wide performance paving the way for sales coaching using customer interactions. Outreach&rsquo;s &ldquo;Amplify AI suite&rdquo;, launched in 2018, leverages ML to categorize buyer intent based on responses to email communication. In May 2020, the company announced the beta launch of &ldquo;Outreach Kaia&rdquo;, a voice-based AI sales assistant. In 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16031?industryIds=27">
 January 2023, 
 </a>
 Outreach introduced Smart Email Assist, an AI-powered automatic email response generator, to streamline workflows for sales teams. In March 2023, the firm introduced 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17465">
 multiple new features
 </a>
 to improve sales pipeline performance and efficiency, including the Create and Close Dashboard, Create Pipeline Calculator, Buyer Topics and Reactions, Success Plans Methodologies, Deal Grid, and Deal Overview. 
 
 
 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 &ldquo;Outreach Commit,&rdquo; a new forecasting tool under Outreach&rsquo;s suite of products. 
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 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 &ldquo;Outreach Data Sharing,&rdquo; which enables organisations to connect Outreach's datasets with other enterprise data and improve sales cycle. 
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In June 2021, the company raised USD 200 million in a Series G funding round, valuing the company at USD 4.4 billion, a significant jump from its USD 1.3 billion valuation in June 2020. The significant jump in valuation may be justified by the company's notable growth over the past 12 months. The funds will be allocated toward expanding into new markets, growing its sales and marketing teams, and platform development.
 
 
 Additionally, in June 2021, the company stated that its annual recurring revenue doubled in Q1 2021 compared to the previous year. In 2020, the company reported a run-rate revenue of USD 100 million. 
 
</div>

Outreach

<div>
 
 Salesloft offers customer relationship management (CRM) integration, sales cadence, sales pipeline management and analytics reporting. It appeals to sales professionals working across the customer lifecycle. The company has offices in Atlanta, San Francisco, London, Indianapolis, New York City, and Guadalajara, Mexico. In August 2021, it announced growth plans in the European market by opening a data center in Germany and doubling headcount in the market. As of February 2022, the platform served 2,000+ customers and has established a partner ecosystem of 100+ companies. In January 2021, Salesloft reported that its client profile had shifted from mid-market to large enterprises such as Google, LinkedIn, Cisco, and Dell. 
 
 
 Salesloft strengthened its product offering in 2021, launched its &ldquo;Deal Engagement Score,&rdquo; an AI-driven function that can prioritize deals based on more than 30 data elements across its Cadence, Conversations, and Deals product offerings, in March 2021. Furthermore, the company announced Cadence Step Analytics and Pre-Built Cadence Frameworks. Cadence Step Analytics allows the user to gain insights on the most effective approach taken through Cadence. Pre-Built Cadence Frameworks is powered by best practices developed through positive sales interactions and the best-performing sales teams. More recently, in April 2022, the company launched its proprietary forecasting tool &ldquo;Forecast by Salesloft&rdquo;, to support organisations in generating predictable growth. 
 
 
 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. In September 2022, the firm unveiled 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/12862">
 Salesloft Rhythm
 </a>
 , a platform to unify sales workflows to be launched in 2023. The firm claims that a unique aspect of this next generation solution is that the platform will provide an explanation as to why the action is important and what the likely outcome will be. 
 
 
 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 partnerships
 
 
 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;
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In December 2021, the company raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Vista Equity Partners at a valuation of USD 2.3 billion, to expand beyond North America and particularly in Europe. In January 2021, Salesloft raised USD 100 million in a funding round led by Owl Rock Capital, to expanding its operations globally while investing in new vertical markets, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-driven insights, and product innovation, as well as growing its headcount by more than 30% within the next year. 
 
 
 In August 2022, the firm reported that annual recurring revenue (ARR) surpassed USD 100 million in Q2 2021.
 
</div>

Salesloft

<div>
 
 People.ai began as a revenue intelligence platform but has widened its product to cover marketing and sales. 
 Its 
 artificial intelligence-based (AI-based) sales and marketing solutions offer sales playbooks and recommendations, automated customer relationship management (CRM), and pipeline visibility. In May 2019, the company launched &ldquo;The Wire&rdquo; which offers a real-time feed of recommended actions based on data collected from sales activity on emails, calendars and CRM systems.The platform is well integrated counting over 90 application programming interface (API) integrations with video conferencing and collaboration tools such as Zoom, GSuite, and Slack. 
 
 
 In September 2022, the firm 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13046">
 launched new features
 </a>
 1) Engagement Dashboards which contain visualisations that provide insight on buyer/seller engagement and 2) Account Planning with a native Salesforce integration which allows sales teams to operationalize account plans and provide customer insights. 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 generative AI 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.&nbsp;
 
 
 Further, the company claimed to have around 70 patents combined (secured and in progress) for its AI-based intelligent matching of customer data and profiles. The platform claimed its AI system has been trained on 1.1 billion sales activities and over USD 239 billion in closed deals. The company planned to deploy its platform outside of the sales realm and into verticals such as real estate, financial services, and recruitment, which already account for a small share of use cases.
 
 
 In October 2020, the company acquired ClosePlan, a sales intelligence app, to further strengthen its AI sales solution. ClosePlan offers sales playbooks, deal scoring, and account planning solutions. 
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 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 &quot;Oracle Fusion Sales&quot; to support its sales process.
 
 
 Funding and financials 
 
 
 People.ai raised USD 100 million in a Series D funding round at a post-money valuation of USD 1.1 billion in August 2021. The round was co-led by new investors Akkadian Ventures and Mubadala Capital. The fresh funds are expected to be allocated to product development through investments in its SmartData platform, and to expand into new industry segments and geographies. The company also revealed that its customer base grew 260% over the 12 months preceding the funding, likely leading to its unicorn valuation. 
 
</div>

People.ai

<div>
 
 Yesware is an email based campaign automation platform for customer engagement. The software offers prospecting tools such as  follow up templates and the ability to schedule meetings through email. The platform includes a native customer relationship management (CRM) integration with Salesforce. In 2013, the company acquired Attachments.me, an email file-sharing startup.  The acquisition was motivated by its complementary backend email technology which added attachment tracking capabilities to Yesware’s platform. The acquisition effectively led to the establishment of a physical office in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Yesware reported a large customer base at the time.
 
 
 As of November 2020, Yesware served around 800,000 total users across 10,000 companies including Yelp, Financial Times, Zendesk, and Cloudflare. The company reported positive cash flow for the first time in Q2 2018 with 60,000 active users.
 
 
 In 
 October
 2022, the company was acquired by 
 Vendasta, a Canadian eCommerce solution provider, to integrate the solution into Vendasta's platform. 
 
</div>

Yesware (acquired by Vendasta)

<div>
 
 Revenue.io (formerly RingDNA) is a sales intelligence platform that offers sales playbooks, multichannel outreach, performance insights, and customer relationship management (CRM) integrations. In addition, the platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to transform conversational data between customers and sales reps into actionable insights on sales rep performance which can be used in building buyer profiles. Revenue.io’s AI-based guided selling features integrate with its sales playbook to create a list of priority leads and then recommends the best way to reach out to a potential buyer.  
 
 
 Revenue.io released its conversation AI solution in November 2019 based on data from more than 130 million sales conversations. This allowed the platform to add sales coaching features to its platform.
 
 
 Guided selling capabilities were introduced in September 2020 and made accessible through its Salesforce CRM integration.
 
 
 The company’s most recent funding round was an October 2018 Series B for USD 30 million led by Goldman Sachs. The funds were allocated for product development and recruitment. Revenue.io’s customers include Hewlett Packard, Amazon Web Services, Autodesk, SAP Concur, Lyft, and Twilio.
 
</div>

Revenue.io

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

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

Sales workflow automation platforms provide solutions for distributed sales teams

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

Floworks

Sales Engagement Platforms

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