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Vymo, a startup developing what it describes as a mobile-first personal sales assistant, today revealed that it recently closed an $18 million series B round led by Emergence Capital, with participation from existing investor Sequoia India. CEO Yamini Bhat says the fresh funds, which bring Vymo’s total raised to over $20 million, following a $5 million series A in November 2016, will lay the groundwork for the startup’s stateside launch, New York headquarters, and continued growth overseas.
“We’re excited to [build] products and companies that offer deep end-user value by learning from behavioral data,” said Bhat, who cofounded Vymo with Venkat Malladi in 2013.
Vymo’s eponymous app for iOS, Android, and web — which supports multiple currency denominations, languages, and time zones — detects customer calls from phone dialer data, identifies meeting prospects from real-time GPS data. Bhat says it’s all about sussing out engagement and sales effectiveness. Through dashboards, Vymo’s platform suggests which clients should be engaged at any given hour and how.
Above: Screenshots from Vymo’s mobile app.
Vymo derives its intelligence from an AI engine that crunches “terabytes” of data each day to generate suggestions and tailor information to field reps’ quarterly targets. It’s able to prioritize partners and leads and recommend meetings based on calendar availability and location (plus other factors), even going so far as to generate a daily route around engagements — factoring in the time each is expected to take. Vymo can also log calls and meetings automatically, measure time spent performing sales activities, deliver follow-up reminders based on calls, and prompt next best actions, all while facilitating interventions that let supervisors step in to guide novice sales reps through tricky situations.
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Companies that prefer a more human touch can minimize Vymo’s AI suggestions by programming rules and allocating agents themselves and by importing leads from external customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, and lead management systems using the platform’s APIs. (Microsoft Dynamics, Pega Marketing, SAP Marketing, Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, and Oracle Marketing Cloud are among the supported suites.) Alternatively, they’re able to take advantage of automated allocation, which accounts for predefined workload performance rules in autonomously assigning leads to sales teams and reps.
As for reps, Vymo provides configurable templates for customers and partners and can scan business cards, receipts, and other documents to auto-populate digital contact cards and expense reports. Vymo boasts reporting and analytics tools and click-and-drag dashboards for real-time and metrics tracking, and it surfaces activity within a feed so team leaders can track best-performing clients and progress toward sales targets and KPIs.
Vymo occupies a CRM segment that’s anticipated to reach $890 million in combined revenue this year. Rivals include Showpad, which in June raised $70 million for its bespoke collection of cloud-based sales tools, and MindTickle, which just this week revealed that it raked in $40 million. That’s not to mention Highspot, which nabbed $60 million for its AI-powered suite of sales solutions.
But Vymo has the advantage of a sizeable install base. It claims its platform is actively used by 100,000 salespeople across over 50 companies, including AXA, Allianz, AIA, Generali, and Sumitomo. That has investors like Emergence Capital partner Jake Saper and Sequoia Capital India Advisors’ Shailesh Lakhani convinced that expansion is on the horizon.
“When it comes to evaluating SaaS investment opportunities, the focus is often on lagging indicators such as churn and revenue growth. But the characteristic our most iconic companies have in common at the time of our investment is a passionate group of highly engaged customers,” said Saper, who plans to join Vymo’s board of directors. “With its exceptionally high user adoption metrics and steadily expanding user base … Vymo is delivering transformational value. It’s the kind of company we at Emergence love partnering with — one that stands to drastically improve the day-to-day work lives of millions of people.”
Lakhani added: “As early partners, we’ve seen Vymo grow rapidly across all metrics, but most importantly in avid adoption by mobile-first workers at some of the largest global enterprises. Vymo is uniquely positioned to become the standard by which sales and distribution is run in these institutions.”
Vymo is headquartered in the U.S. and has offices in Singapore, Japan, Australia, and India. It has been recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor in the CRM space and is a winner of both CB Insights’ Demo Day and Microsoft’s AI for All awards.
