SalesLoft Lands $70M As Intelligent Tooling Heats Up

AI-powered tools are having a moment.

This morning, Atlanta-based sales engagement platform SalesLoft announced a $70 million Series D led by Insight Partners. In case you didn’t realize it, SalesLoft has an intelligence/analytics layer. This round gives it a valuation of $600 million, according to TechCrunch, although the company is declining to comment on that.1

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Last week, another AI-powered sales engagement platform Outreach raised a $114 Series E, making that Seattle company a unicorn with a $1.1 billion valuation according to this blog post by CEO Manny Medina.2

In addition to those large deals, yesterday our own Alex Wilhelm wrote about how a company called Eightfold.ai had announced a $28 million round. That company uses AI to help companies hire talented people. Also, Textio recently launched a cool writing tool powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence.3

But let’s get back to SalesLoft for now. The company told me it grew its recurring revenue by more than 1,000 percent between January 2016 to January 2019. The company has also doubled its number of employees to 400, compared to last year at this time. Its platform, according to SalesLoft, helps companies “create a personalized, scalable, and consistent go-to-market process across a sales organization.”

In a release, SalesLoft CEO and co-founder Kyle Porter said he believes AI-powered sales engagement platforms are doing so well because “buyers are simply turned off by antiquated, impersonal sales tactics.” The company plans to use the money to scale domestically and globally. It has offices in Atlanta, San Francisco, New York and London.

The promise of AI always seems to be a few years out. But it does appear that some products that are powered by emerging machine intelligence are out in the market. Expect more to come, and more money to follow.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias