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Salespeople, on the whole, are enthusiastic about artificial intelligence (AI). In a survey of 2,900 teams conducted by Salesforce earlier this year, 66 percent characterized AI’s ability to glean customer sentiment and engagement as “transformative,” and 65 percent said that AI-powered insights into business developments, emails, and calendar data would “make them more effective in their job.”
That bullishness no doubt helped propel Chorus.ai, a three-year-old San Francisco and Tel Aviv startup that uses AI to analyze sales calls, to new heights. It today revealed that it’s raised $33 million in series B financing from Georgian Partners and returning investors Redpoint Ventures and Emergence Capital, following a $16 million series A funding round in February 2017 and a $6.3 million seed round in October 2016. To date, Chorus has brought in $55.3 million.
CEO and cofounder Roy Raanani said the capital will be used to “accelerate customer acquisition.” As part of the round, Georgian Partners’ Simon Chong will join the company’s board of directors.
“Chorus.ai exists to help Sales teams have higher quality conversations that result in higher quota attainment, higher rep productivity, and shorter new hire ramp time,” Raanani said. “Billions of dollars in revenue are flowing through video conferencing platforms and phone calls.”
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Much like competitors Deepgram and Cogito, Chorus leverages proprietary natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to glean insights from recorded calls. But somewhat uniquely, its solutions are laser-focused on the sales domain.
Above: Chorus.ai analyzing the contents of a meeting.
The company’s platform acts as a sort of autonomous secretary, joining sales phone and video calls and recording and transcribing content in real time. NLP systems work in tandem with a language model (and optical character recognition for video calls) to figure out who’s saying what, and they together draw on past recordings in order to build a bespoke, per-client database of conversations, repetitions, jargon, and turns of phrase.
Chorus’ AI has trained on more than three million calls to date, resulting in speech recognition the company claims is up to 25 percent more accurate for sales calls than off-the-shelf models.
After a call ends, Chorus provides a summary and notes in a web-based dashboard — Conversation Cloud — where it highlights useful information and juicy tidbits worth a follow-up, like risk factors and upsell opportunities.
It’s fully SSL encrypted and SOC 2 type II certified, Raanani says, and it integrates with popular meeting platforms like BlueJeans, WebEx, Zoom, and UberConference; engagement platforms including Outreach, RingCentral, SalesLoft, and Five9; and Saleforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) suite.
Chorus’ goal is to boost conversions, ultimately. But Raanani says that even when deals don’t close, it serves as a valuable teaching tool.
“Studies show that win rates increase by 33 percent with a proper coaching program in place, yet most managers don’t have the time to sit in on calls, and no one has the capacity to learn from the thousands of meetings that take place each quarter,” he said. “Chorus.ai lets companies immediately discover moments that impact selling outcomes and that can be used for real-time sales coaching, for collaboration, and for replicating what works.”
Chorus says its tools can increase performance by 30 percent, and that some customers in its roster — which includes TrustRadius, Qualtrics, Marketo, AdRoll, Adobe, Procore, Outreach, and Drift, to name a few — report as high as 50 percent greater quota attainment.
“We are excited to continue our exponential growth in 2019 and have big plans to help more sales teams win,” Raanani said. “I believe that there is no better way to impact the success of your company than by ensuring that crucial conversations like sales and customer success meetings are impactful. In sales, you only get one shot.”
