Atlanta-based Silicon Road Ventures’ latest portfolio company came out of stealth mode today with big plans to change how companies get those all important business leads.
Pitchit, founded in San Francisco by Paul Kleen, is an AI Lead Qualification as a Service (LQaaS) Platform that helps automate the first 24 hours of manual labor required to qualify inbound leads.
The team says that to date, the platform has helped telecom and insurance sales teams qualify over 530,000 leads, save over 4,400 meetings, and close over $280 million in customer revenue, according to a press statement.
Those numbers have attracted investors in Pitchit’s early stage. Today, the team announced it closed an oversubscribed $2.5 million seed round. The round was led by Silicon Road Ventures, with participation from Atlanta-based Gray Ventures, Plug and Play Tech Center, and Alchemist Accelerator.
Kleen and the Pitchit team got connected with Silicon Road Ventures through the Plug and Play Tech Center. Kleen pitched at the venture capital firm’s Fall Summit in 2023, where they met the team behind Silicon Road Ventures and ultimately got connected to Gray Ventures.
“Today’s consumers demand a fast, frictionless, and personalized sales experience, yet sales teams are overwhelmed with the volume of potential leads that require rapid and accurate qualification across a growing number of channels,” said Frank Tighe, Managing Director and Partner at Silicon Road Ventures, in a press statement. “We’re thrilled to lead the investment in Pitchit’s AI platform because it is a quantum leap forward for B2C sales teams: it streamlines the lead qualification process and ensures that sales professionals reach potential customers at the moment they are ready to buy.”
Getting Better Leads
Before jumping into the startup world, Kleen was a data scientist at Framed Data (acquired by Square) and Head of Growth at Paperspace (acquired by Digital Ocean). He went on to start marketing and sales technology consulting for 300 businesses. That experience gave him unique insights into how company’s think strategically about qualified leads.
“Over and over at these businesses, I saw the same series of events happening in this exact sequence:
- Leads were very expensive to acquire through advertising and marketing
- Sales teams were too slow to get ahold of them (in my research, sales teams kept 63% of their leads waiting 15 minutes or more before finally contacting them)
- When sales teams can’t provide an instant customer experience where they contact inbound leads immediately upon those leads showing interest, their close rate drops dramatically
- When close rates are low, the cost per sale becomes astronomical so the business decides to shut down the whole marketing funnel, and people lose their jobs.”
Those insights helped him decide to launch Pitchit.
“Given the new technological leap that AI has brought to the marketplace, we are finally able to provide a solution to this doom loop. In our customer case studies, we’ve seen a 250% increase in qualified leads when sales teams add Pitchit to their lead qualification process. This has made cost per sale lower, and therefore has saved sales jobs that ultimately would have been lost had they not utilized Pitchit,” Kleen told Hypepotamus.
With the infusion of capital, Pitchit will look to expand its AI capabilities, adding more sophisticated text and voice recognition features.
