Atlanta-headquartered SalesLoft, the sales engagement platform, has closed a $50 million Series C funding round led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from LinkedIn and existing investor Emergence Capital. This brings the company, which last year was ranked the seventh fastest-growing technology company in North America by Deloitte, up to $75 million in total outside funding.
Previous funding had been raised from primarily local investors, including Atlanta Tech Village co-founder and Atlanta Venture partner David Cummings and cybersecurity veteran Tom Noonan.
Aly Merritt, SalesLoft’s Chief of Staff, says the company worked with New York-based Insight Ventures “because we believe they are the best ‘scale past $100 million SaaS firm.'”
“We’re a global firm with customers in 30 countries and employees in a dozen cities. But we love Atlanta, and it will always be our headquarters,” Merritt says.
SalesLoft founder and CEO Kyle Porter says the large capital influx will be used for aggressive hiring across the board. Currently right above 200 employees, they plan to double that with an additional 200 across Atlanta, San Francisco, New York and Europe — they recently brought on a new Chief People Officer to build out recruiting and on-boarding processes.
Merritt says they will also focus on product innovation. “This will include investments in AI and data science, SalesLoft Assist, delivering to the enterprise arena, and doubling down on our ‘security first’ approach.”
SalesLoft’s software aims to blend the personal side of sales with process and data-driven insights, making a sales cycle that is scalable, partially-automated, and repeatable. The platform analyzes both emails and calls, allowing the whole sales team to access the same dashboard; it includes features like call coaching to help junior team members improve their process, and Gmail and Salesforce integrations.
With the rise of personalized sales and their robust platform, SalesLoft has seen more than 800 percent growth over the past two years.
“We didn’t create the sales engagement category; our customers did,” Porter said in a release. “Users are spending more time within SalesLoft than any other technology, including their CRM. Our customers are leading the way in this exciting new category, which is really just a reflection of their efforts to serve their customers in new, authentic ways.”
Another popular integration on the platform is LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.
“SalesLoft has integrated Sales Navigator into their application in a way that provides great user value while protecting LinkedIn member data. We look forward to working with SalesLoft to create even more value for our joint customers in the future,” said Doug Camplejohn, LinkedIn’s VP of Product, Sales Solutions, in a statement.
Now, the company plans to release an even more forward-thinking product. Announced at their Rainmaker conference this February, the company will launch a dynamic artificial intelligence-driven product, SalesLoft Assist, that uses previous interaction data to inform best practices to drive sales.
SalesLoft Assist is informed by data from hundreds of millions of sales interactions.
“We deliver insights and information on buyers and accounts at the point of communication. SalesLoft Assist takes this to the next level, using data and insights to suggest the next best step and improve the process,” says Merritt. “Customers are already using elements of it today — our services team is even using it regularly to help customers with their cadences — and it will continue to evolve as the data and insights grow.”
Featured photo provided by SalesLoft
