ToutApp Raises $15M To Build Email Tools For Salespeople

Email-focused startup ToutApp has raised a $15 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The company started out as an email-tracking tool, but founder and CEO Tawheed Kader told me that his team discovered that salespeople “used the product the most, complained the least, and stuck around the longest.” So ToutApp decided to do a “zoom-in pivot” and focus on that customer base.

It was’t an immediate decision, Kader said — sure, it’s easy to see a business in selling software to sales teams, but was it something he and his employees could get excited about? Ultimately, he said they decided, “We love our customers and we think the idea of a salesperson is also changing for the better, sales culture is changing for the better. We can be the company that essentially builds a religion for salespeople that elevates the sales game.”

To be clear, ToutApp isn’t looking to replace existing sales tools. Instead, it integrates with email and CRM, and the vision is to eventually become the core interface through which salespeople use these products.

Kader offered a few examples of how the current product can make sales teams more effective — it can use templates to suggest different strategies for reaching out to sales leads, it offers a faster flow for scheduling meetings, and it gives salespeople a feed showing when people are engaging with their messages.

ToutApp customers include Atlassian, Dropbox, and Optimizely.

The Series B brings the startup’s total funding to more than $20 million, with Andreessen Horowitz’s Scott Weiss joining the board of directors. Previous investors Sigma West, Founder Collective, 500 Startups and the Launch Fund also participated.