Bounti Labs Secures $16M in Seed Funding for AI-Powered Sales Assistant

Google Ventures-Backed Bounti Raises $16 Million for AI Teammate for Sales Teams | PYMNTS.com

Bounti has come out of stealth and announced it raised $16 million in seed funding for its artificial intelligence (AI) teammate platform for sales, marketing and customer success teams. The company's platform is designed to perform repetitive, non-revenue generating work that would otherwise be done by these teams, allowing them to focus on customer relationships, Bounti said in a Thursday (Sept. 12) press release. "At Bounti, we're creating technology that empowers sales, marketing and customer success teams to focus on meaningful human work, and this investment shows that our vision is one that the industry believes in," Matt Cooley, co-founder of Bounti, said in the release. Bounti's approach is to combine the capabilities of software with those of "real, trained humans" to accelerate companies' revenue goals, Ashar Rizqi, co-founder of Bounti, said in the release. "We will use our funding to invest aggressively in expanding capabilities across both the software platform and human-in-the-loop services component," Rizqi said. The company's first AI teammate specializes in prospecting, according to the release. It researches companies, identifies buyers and generates personalized emails. Because of Bounti's belief that humans must be involved in the outreach, the AI teammate delivers this information to a company's sales rep rather than simply automating the mass delivery of emails, the release said. This approach saves time for the sales team, provides up-to-the-minute research and enables sales reps to get the conversations started more quickly, per the release. Bounti's seed round was led by Google Ventures, according to the release. "We share Bounti's vision that AI will transform knowledge work as we know it, and we're excited to support the team as they bring real AI-driven value to go-to-market teams," Sangeen Zeb, general partner at Google Ventures, said in the release. While generative AI is expanding workers' capabilities, experts warn that human oversight remains crucial to ensure quality and avoid pitfalls, PYMNTS reported Monday (Sept. 9). Experts recommend a balanced approach to harness AI's potential while mitigating risks. At consumer and retail companies, 57% of marketing and sales teams are actively pursuing generative AI initiatives, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and AI-ID collaboration, "What Generative AI Has in Store for the Retail Industry."

Autonomous AI sales agent startup Bounti Labs raises $16M in seed funding - SiliconANGLE

Autonomous AI sales agent startup Bounti Labs raises $16M in seed funding Autonomous artificial intelligence agent startup Bounti Labs Inc. stepped into the spotlight today, announcing it has closed on a $16 million seed funding round led by Google Ventures. Investors including Floodgate, Bloomberg Beta, Haystack, Octave Ventures and MS&AD also participated in the round, as did Silicon Valley veteran Lew Cirne, the founder and former chief executive of New Relic Inc. The startup said Cirne will become the company's first independent board member. Bounti is the creator of what it describes as a "full-stack, full-funnel agentic AI teammate platform" that's geared specifically toward sales, marketing and customer success teams. The company says that instead of replacing these professionals, it simply wants to free them up from non-revenue generating work, so they can focus on creating personal connections with sales prospects and getting their deals over the line. The startup criticizes existing sales-based AI agents, saying that these models are "broken" because they have eroded personalization and human connections. According to Bounti co-founder and CEO Matt Cooley, many customers are "exhausted with outreach that doesn't connect to their needs." Bounti wants to do AI agents differently, and it plans to create a series of AI teammates that specialize in various aspects of the sales business. To begin with, it's kicking off with a Bounti teammate that specializes in prospecting, with powerful capabilities that allow it to automate research and personalized outreach. It says its agent can come up with more than 500 new sales prospects within just 10 minutes of searching for them, complete with contact information for the person responsible for buying in each organization. In addition to this research, Bounti will also create highly personalized emails for each lead it unearths, so sales reps can avoid spammy and repetitive outreach. Bounti's other co-founder, Ashar Rizqi, said sales professionals will feel as if they're paired with a highly trained professional in the latest sales methodologies. As such, they'll be able to avoid the mundane tasks involved in lead generation and focus solely on delivering outcomes. Though Bounti's platform is designed to keep humans in the loop, customers can also hand off the entire prospecting and outreach process to its AI models if they desire. Bernie Kassar, founder and CEO of Latitude Ʒ9 Inc., an early adopter of Bounti's AI agent, said it has proven to be an "incredible time saver" for his teams. "Bounti allows for intelligent conversations to happen much faster by removing the mundane work that bogs everyone down," he said. "You only get one chance to make a first impression." Bounti said the funds from today's round will be used to invest aggressively in expanding the capabilities of its AI agents, and especially the human-in-the-loop services component.