Kronologic has closed on $3.5 million in seed funding led by Silverton Partners to solve what it has dubbed “the last mile problem” between sales and marketing departments.
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Next Coast Ventures and Geekdom Fund also participated in the financing, which brings Kronologic’s total raised since its 2018 inception to about $4.5 million.
Kronologic describes its platform as “the world’s first calendar monetization engine” which “delivers the absolute best experience for parties working to schedule a virtual meeting.” Or, in other words, the company has created a SaaS-based platform that converts sales leads into meetings.
In a short amount of time, Austin-based Kronologic has built some impressive momentum. Customers include tech giant Dell, Thomson Reuters, Gartner, Storable and BigCommerce.
From the second quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2019, Kronologic says it saw annual recurring revenue on average growth of 260 percent, according to co-founder and CEO Trey Allison.
Optimizing for success
Allison said he and one of Kronologic’s co-founders, Ben Parker, came up with the idea from their experience at VMware. The pair left their roles at the company to launch Kronologic and focus on building out the technology full-time. (Kronologic was actually incorporated in 2016 but formally launched in 2018).
“Ninety percent of a company’s leads never convert to meetings and are simply a lost investment,” Allison told Crunchbase News. “Only a small percentage actually turn into opportunities. The efficiency loss is nuts.”
Many companies in recent years have tried to solve this problem by just hiring more salespeople. But Kronologic has set out to quantify the process.
The startup’s platform uses artificial intelligence to automate the process of lead conversion, thus cutting down on the need for cold calling or spamming prospects, Allison said. It does this specifically by automating types of virtual meetings common in revenue-focused departments. The company claims to “optimize time itself” by making the calendar a platform for monetization and optimization for client-facing employees
The company’s active scheduling technology requires “only a single-click for prospects and zero thought whatsoever from reps.”
“The idea is that a robot does the lift for both sales and prospects, and does the scheduling automatically,” Allison added.
“Kronologic doesn’t tell you what to do or make suggestions. It actually does the work for you,” added Parker.
In addition to booking meetings, Kronologic’s trademarked “Meeting Math” calculates the value of different meetings and “optimizes the total value across a team’s calendar.”
Investor POV
As part of the investment, Silverton Partners’ Roger Chen joins Kronologic’s board. What really piqued his interest was that Kronologic had developed a solution with “a surprising simplicity to the user experience.
“And yet what supported it behind the scenes was surprisingly complex,” he told Crunchbase News.
What makes Kronologic different from other offerings in the sales enablement space is that it helps client companies actually rethink how a salesperson makes use of their time, according to Chen. The startup then considers it in the context of the salesperson’s team and the broader sales and marketing strategy rather than simply “working out a way to incrementally improve sales conversions.”
The nine-person company plans to use its new capital primarily to hire more engineering talent and to scale its sales and marketing teams.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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