When Warmly started a couple of years ago, people were meeting regularly in Zoom and the company provided a custom background and information about the participants. It was useful as far as it went, but when the founders had trouble selling the approach, they decided to pivot to a new idea: providing warm leads for sales departments by pushing data about people who are in active buy mode on a website.
Today the company announced an $11 million Series A to keep building on that vision. The round was led by Felicis with participation from NFX, Zoom Ventures, F-Prime Capital, Maven Ventures and other unnamed investors.
Warmly co-founder and CEO Max Greenwald says the new product emerged from their own problems selling their product. “We basically realized that it was very difficult to sell, and being called Warmly, we wanted to take a warmer approach. And that’s actually what led us to focus on this next revamp of the company, which is this autonomous sales platform that automates away the busy work of salespeople, but also helps hyper target sellers at finding the warmest leads possible,” Greenwald told TechCrunch.
The Warmly solution is taking a bunch of sales tools and pulling them together to find the leads. “The Warmly platform orchestrates metadata from Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Outreach and Salesloft and combines them with intent data from 6sense, Clearbit and Bombora to identify, track and connect with website visitors who are in active buy mode,” according to the company.
Greenwald says while there are a lot of tools working in the background, it just takes one line of code on the website to start monitoring the traffic. It looks for signals that the visitor is ready to buy, and can work with a bot to send a message or even just a wave to the potential customer, or send a Slack message to a salesperson to engage with the customer or company that seems ready to buy.
“We start taking your anonymous website traffic and we tell you who’s visiting, so the companies, and even sometimes the people, that come to your website, and then in an instant, we can help you take action on that,” he said.
He says they have a free tier for individual sales people to attract users to the solution. When a sales team wants to get involved, it’s $850 a month or about $10,000 a year, and they also have an enterprise tier for more advanced sales workflows. The company has 100 paying customers to this point, including New Relic, Gainsight and Sendoso.
With obvious privacy implications, Greenwald says the company is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA and other privacy and security requirements.
Aydin Senkut, who is leading the investment at Felicis, says one of the things that attracted him to the team is that he is a former Google employee, and so are the three founders, and he says it’s an excellent training ground for founders, but he said more importantly, Warmly solves a problem he sees frequently in the company’s portfolio companies around finding leads.
“We also saw, having a broad portfolio, how many of our portfolio companies struggle with this issue,” he said. “We were very supportive in nudging the team, maybe being a positive voice in terms of like, yes, we should double down on this latest iteration because it has great potential.”
Greenwald says that Felicis has been able to make introductions to some of those portfolio companies, which has been helpful in launching and refining this new version of the product.
He says the fact they weren’t trained as sales people was actually an advantage because they could look at the problem with fresh eyes. “We weren’t indoctrinated in this cold call, cold email, smile and dial all day long kind of ethos around sales, and we came in and said, ‘wait, why can’t we just automate all the stuff that nobody really wants to do?’”