SiftHub, an AI startup founded by former LogiNext CTO and co-founder Manisha Raisinghani, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding to develop its AI assistant, which aims to help business teams sales and pre-sales to focus more on relationship building and less on the heavy lifting.
The company’s generative AI assistant targets most of the non-sales activities that sales staff have to deal with, such as entering data into CRM systems, filing requests for proposals (RFPs), researching customer information and creation of presentations. SiftHub integrates with information sources like Google Drive, Slack, Zendesk, HubSpot, and Salesforce, and sales and pre-sales teams can simply talk to its AI assistant to fill out informational questionnaires. security, supplier evaluation forms and file tenders and request for information (RFI) forms. . The assistant is available through Slack and Microsoft Teams as a bot, as a Microsoft add-in, Chrome plugin, and web app, and supports 10 languages, including Spanish and German.
“When sellers sell to enterprises, they should spend more time building relationships, which directly impacts revenue,” Raisinghani told TechCrunch. “When you don’t need to hire as many pre-sales people to do the deep technical work for you, you save time and that impacts your bottom line,” she told TechCrunch.
SiftHub’s AI assistant is built on open source Extended Language Models (LLM) and is supported by Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, which uses additional data sources to refine the quality of generated content by AI. Using RAGs in addition to LLMs helps SiftHub limit hallucinations – a common problem with generative AI, where the system generates incorrect or misleading results. The startup also uses cross-encoders to prevent its platform from selecting the wrong information from a given knowledge base. Cross-encoders analyze two queries simultaneously, instead of examining them separately, to provide more accurate answers.
“We would rather not give an answer than give a wrong answer,” Raisinghani said. The founder added that SiftHub’s system might give 5% fewer answers, but she is confident that at least 75% of the AI’s answers will be correct.
SiftHub also uses an “intelligent search algorithm” that takes into account the recency of documents or knowledge sources to surface relevant recent information, Raisinghani said.
After spending more than 10 years at LogiNext, Raisinghani saw the need for a solution like SiftHub when she was advising blockchain startup Polygon Labs in 2022 on its enterprise go-to-market strategy. She realized that finding information on Polygon was a daunting task because the data was not available through a single channel, as it was stored across multiple platforms. Salespeople and pre-sales people need a lot of information about their company and its business operations when contacting potential customers. Finding this information through various sources, including company Slack channels and other unorganized documents, is a tedious task that can take up a lot of time.
She then spoke with around 200 users to better understand the problem statement and categorize their responses into different use cases. All of this eventually led her to focus on sales and pre-sales teams.
“Sales teams have a shadow team – a pre-sales team or solutions engineers – and they are usually the unsung heroes of the organization. They do a lot of the technical work, from filing RFPs (requests for proposals) to finding answers to customer questions,” she explained. “If you save time on both sales and pre-sales, sellers will automatically be able to spend more time building relationships. »
The market for AI startups focused on sales and pre-sales operations has gained traction in the past year since generative AI took off. Companies across the spectrum, from giants like Salesforce, Zoom, and Google to startups like Quilt, People.ai, and Darwin AI, have created GenAI-based tools to enable sellers to simplify a wide range of tasks like filing routine forms, generating draft emails, populating CRMs with publicly available customer information, generating copies, getting suggestions on which potential customers might purchase or opt out, And much more.
However, Raisinghani believes that SiftHub has a distinctive advantage because it fits deeper into customers’ business workflows and can solve the entire business response problem, unlike a “wrapper around OpenAI or any other LLM”.
The startup also leverages Raisinghani’s experience in startup development and his team of 15, which includes ex-entrepreneurs. “When you give at least 10 years of your life to something, you want to know that you’re going to be excited about it and really believe in it for the next decade,” she said. The company is headquartered in the United States and has an R&D team in Mumbai, India.
The funding will be used to hire more people in product R&D, improve the product and help the company launch into the market. The seed round was co-led by Matrix Venture Partners and Blume Ventures, with participation from Neon Fund as well as executives and founders from Superhuman, Cloudflare, DevRev, RazorPay and SuperOps.
SiftHub is initially targeting B2B companies selling to mid-market and enterprise customers with revenues between $50 million and $500 million. The AI assistant is currently available to a small group of users for early feedback, and the startup plans a “full launch” later this year.
“Buyers have become smarter and are engaging sales later in the buying journey, with more advanced questions. As a result, the expectations of sales teams have changed: they must know advanced product, technical and legal information to achieve victory. Sales and pre-sales teams do not have the necessary tools to manage this new sales environment. We are excited about SiftHub’s vision to use AI to manage product knowledge so sales can focus on relationships,” said Pranay Desai, partner at Matrix Partners India, in a prepared statement.
“SiftHub is Manisha’s second venture in the SaaS space. With over a decade of entrepreneurial experience and an impressive track record, Manisha and her team are building a revolutionary AI platform to transform the entire sales and pre-sales process. We are excited to support the SiftHub team and be part of their ambitious journey,” said Sanjay Nath, Partner at Blume Ventures.
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