Introducing Avoma and announcing our Seed funding

We’re excited to launch Avoma in public and announce our $3M Seed funding led by K9 Ventures with participation from TSVC, HubSpot Ventures, and many prominent angels.

Why Avoma?

A couple of weeks ago I met with a VP of Sales (VPS) of a large technology and services company at a conference event. We introduced ourselves and when I explained to him what Avoma does, his first question was - “Why??? There are these highly funded competitors, so why start something new?”

Below is a real conversation that happened as a response to his question.

Aditya: “So do you use one of these competitors’ solutions?"

VPS: “Oh no, they’re insanely expensive! I had seen a demo, and their rep sent me another $300 wine to book another demo!”

Aditya: “Interesting. We’re more affordable, but that’s not the only reason we’ve started this company. Tell me more about what did you get out of that demo?”

VPS: “Well, the main thing was I can search and listen to my reps’ calls”.

Aditya: “Hmm. So essentially it was an ‘expensive’ call recording software?”

VPS: “Yeah, kind of! Well they have analytics across the team that could be useful for me to see what each rep is doing.”

Aditya: “What about the reps? Would they find value in it?”

VPS: “Well they may go back and listen to their call for note-taking”.

Aditya: “Ok. What’s your view on how many tasks reps do before, during and after the meeting to have one conversation with a prospect?”

VPS: “Well, a lot! There are so many moving parts.”

Aditya: “Do you think some of those low-value tasks can be automated and high-value tasks can be augmented?”

VPS: “Oh yes, that would be huge!”

Aditya: “Well, that’s why we started Avoma. We’re building the first end-to-end AI meeting assistant that’s helping customer-facing reps to automate their all possible meeting tasks and get better at having effective conversations. Do you think anyone is doing this today?”

VPS: “That’s interesting. No, I haven’t seen this problem is solved yet, and it’s a huge pain.”

Aditya: “But there is one more thing. What if you could get this AI Assistant for reps, but also get those other benefits for you as a leader with Conversation analytics and insights in the same solution?”

VPS: “That’s incredible!”

Aditya: “Well, that’s what we do at Avoma!”

And this is just the beginning.

The Future of Work

An executive at a publicly-traded company told me they had hired an Executive Assistant for their Top Sales executive. He was so good that all he would do is hop from one call to another. his Executive Assistant would dial in to calls for him, take notes during the meeting, share those notes with the rest of the team, enter data into CRM for that opportunity, send a follow-up email to customers, among other more tedious tasks.

We are on a mission to democratize that experience. We want to provide the most comprehensive executive assistant experience for the customer-facing people.

We started Avoma a little over 2 years now, and have been maniacally focused on understanding what various tasks people do before, during and after meetings and what are their workflows around preparing for a meeting, running a meeting and then capturing key insights from these conversations and sharing and collaborating with other team members.

We found that the customer-facing team members experience the pain of inefficient and ineffective meetings the highest and feel it most frequently.

On the efficiency front, to have just one conversation with a prospect or a customer, a typical Salesperson or a CSM will juggle between 5-6 different tools, and they do it for 50+ times a month. There is so much inefficiency, context switching, and information loss across all these tools and in each conversation.

And on the effectiveness front, it was even worse because for the rest of the organization, these conversations are a black box. They have no visibility in terms of what’s going on in these calls. They are not aware of what are the common and popular objections and feature requests prospects and customers are making. They don’t know how reps are handling these objections, and what are the top performers doing well that other reps are not doing.

We believe that these are two sides of the same coin. So we decided to build the most comprehensive AI meeting assistant for the customer-facing reps like Account Executives, Customer Success Managers, or Implementation Managers. But at the same time, we provide equally valuable conversation intelligence across all team members so Managers, Leaders and even cross-functional teammates can find actionable insights from these conversations.

These customer-facing conversations are goldmines for customer insights and feedback; however, that information is often lost unless someone is actually spending hours taking detailed notes, collating insights, and then sharing those insights within their organization.

I’ve already written in detail about this here: Why We Built A Tool That Automatically Takes Notes And Analyzes Sales and Customer Calls.

Our Fundraising

But today, I want to share another important and exciting milestone in Avoma’s journey. We’ve raised $3M in Seed capital led by K9 Ventures with participation from TSVC, HubSpot Ventures, Dragon Capital, and other prominent angels.

K9 Ventures has been an early investor in some revolutionary companies like Twilio and believed the way Twilio is an infrastructure layer for Voice and SMS communications, Avoma would be an intelligence layer for conversations.

TSVC was also an early investor in Zoom.us, which revolutionized the Video Conferencing solution with a better product, they could see Avoma as the smarter and intelligence future of Video Communications.

And lastly, HubSpot is already rethinking the holistic customer experience by providing easy to use and intuitive, yet comprehensive Marketing, Sales and Service solutions. With Avoma, HubSpot Ventures saw the potential of automating and augmenting the grunt work of taking notes and updating CRM for their customers and helping them get better at what they do by providing actionable insights.

We are incredibly fortunate to get to work with these amazing investors and advisors and looking forward to building an even better and greater Avoma - both as a product and also as a company in the upcoming year.

Last but not least, we are also very thankful to our team members (both present and past) for believing in us at this early stage and building this incredibly powerful product. We are also very grateful to early customers who have trusted us and provided valuable feedback and spent countless hours with us. You’re truly our partners and not just customers.

Try it Out

Avoma offers a free trial to get started and try it out without any commitment. It typically takes less than 5 minutes to set up your account, integrates with the tools you already use and experience the value literally in your next meeting. You can learn more about our different tiers, functionalities and pricing options.