Unique, a video calls platform that uses AI to teach sales teams how to improve their pitches, has closed a $6 million seed round from a bunch of angel investors. These include Philipp Stauffer (U.S based founder and general partner of Fyrfly Venture Partners) and Daniel Gutenberg.
Unique uses AI to analyse customer conversations. The video recordings of these then help sales people work out which parts of their pitch work best.
It can do this in 12 languages, including tough ones like Swiss German. The upside, says the company, is that this can reduce the time to train salespeople and improve their performance. It will also capture key moments of the sales video call that are securely shared in a “Deal Room” in one place that buyers can refer back to and share with their own teams.
The company was founded by serial entrepreneurs Manuel Grenacher and Andreas Hauri, following their own experiences of building and guiding a sales team at Coresystems, a B2B SaaS startup they previously sold to SAP.
Grenacher said: “With remote and hybrid working here to stay, sales teams are often far away from their customers, prospects, and from their own colleagues and team leaders. This makes it difficult for them to connect with customers and to learn from their team, to get feedback and to ramp up. We are building Unique to reinvent the sales process, using AI to analyse conversations to light up key moments of insight and connection to help sales teams and customers build deeper, more productive relationships.”
Philipp Stauffer, investor, said: “The intersection of the sales force automation and the conversational intelligence markets will see itself catapulted ahead both in terms of buying priority at Fortune500 companies as well as growth rates. The value creation opportunity to enhance sales outcomes is simply massive.”
Unique competes with the likes of Gong.io and People.AI, (both unicorns). Where the startup may have an edge, however is with its “Deal Room” approach, plus the fact it’s built in Europe and therefore complies with strict GDPR privacy regulations. It may also eat into Zoom’s market as well, if sales teams start using it more than the latter.