Jiminny, a U.K.-based conversational intelligence platform that companies use to record, transcribe and analyze communications from across sales and other customer-facing teams, today announced it has raised $16.5 million in a Series A round of funding (Kennet Partners was the sole investor).
Founded out of London in 2016, Jiminny offers companies the technology to gain insights into how well their sales or customer support teams are engaging with their clients across voice, video, email and messaging.
By integrating into a company’s broader tech stack, including calendars, CRMs, dialers and video conferencing tools, Jiminny can provide insights such as which personnel are most successful at converting that initial “discovery call” into a serious prospect (or even a sale), and dive directly into the call that made it happen.
Companies can also use Jiminny to identify customer sentiment and satisfaction, and zone in on what messaging the sales and marketing teams need to be focusing on, for example.
A core component of Jiminny is its data, which breaks down conversations in terms of metrics such as talk-to-listen ratio, listening skills and monologues, to show which staff are most adept at what skill, and which of these deliver the best outcomes. From this, companies can identify which practices work best, and use this information to coach other personnel.
On top of that, Jiminny offers a “chat and whisper” feature, which is basically a live coaching tool that allows leaders and senior sales reps to join a voice or video call, and talk newer colleagues through things they should be saying.
Conversation piece
The burgeoning conversational intelligence space is heating up, with the likes of Observe.ai recently securing $125 million in financing, while Gong hit a $7.25 billion valuation off the back of a $250 million fundraise. In the M&A realm, meanwhile, Zoominfo acquired Chorus.ai last year for $575 million shortly after Allego snapped up Refract.
This, according to Jiminny founder and CEO Tom Lavery, has been driven (somewhat predictably) by the rise of remote and hybrid work, with businesses seeking new ways to generate insights and skill-up those working in disparate locations.
“The shift to hybrid work over the last two years has led to an explosive growth in demand for conversational intelligence tools and solutions with adjacent capabilities such as voice AI technology, for example,” Lavery told TechCrunch. “This comes as customer service and sales reps look to add these tools into their existing sales tech stack, to scale up operations as they operate remotely, and to formalize and improve staff coaching.”
While it’s clear that Jiminny operates in a busy space, the company claims that it stands out on a number of fronts, including the array of languages it supports — businesses can use Jiminny to transcribe more than 30 languages, including French, Spanish, German and Japanese, and turn this into actionable data in English. On top of that, Jiminny also touts its ability to provide summaries of long sales calls, while it supports for a wider range CRMs compared to its rivals in the space.
Despite having only raised $2.5 million in seed funding in its six-year history, Jiminny has amassed a fairly impressive roster of customers such as Cision and Just Eat. And with another $16.5 million in the bank, the company has a solid financial foundation to build on that.
“Our funding round will help accelerate our expansion into more markets with product development in the works,” Lavery said. “We’ll also double down on research and development to drive innovation that will benefit our customers.”
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