Chorus.ai, Raises $6.3M in Its First Round of Funding, Led by Emergence Capital

Chorus, a San Francisco- and Tel-Aviv-based startup that adds AI to sales conversations and learns what works to close more deals, today announced it raised $6.3 million in its first round of funding, led by Emergence Capital, and is launching its flagship platform out of stealth mode after a year in development. Chorus’ software is the first to successfully combine artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and natural language processing (NLP) to unite sales conversations into a single dashboard, helping companies learn what works, and multiply successes across their sales teams.

“We see tremendous opportunity in deploying AI to improve the sales cycle,” said Gordon Ritter, Co-Founder and General Partner at Emergence Capital, a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has backed enterprise software companies like Salesforce.com, Yammer, SuccessFactors, Box and Veeva. “Companies spend billions of dollars optimizing everything around sales, but until Chorus, no one has been able to see into the most critical part: the actual sales conversations.”

Companies like Cisco Meraki, Marketo, Qualtrics and Talkable are all working with Chorus to unify, learn from and improve their sales conversations based on patterns of success surfaced through machine learning.

“After seeing Chorus in action, I realized I could now have the solution that I had only dreamed of when it comes to ramping, coaching and fine tuning my team’s sales pitch,” said Mitch Stewart, Cloud Networking Senior Director, Worldwide Inside Sales at Cisco Systems. “It will allow my reps to improve more quickly and will give me the tools to guide their growth in a personalized and impactful way.”

How it works: #

Chorus is like Waze for sales conversations, boosted with Natural Language Processing and AI: it helps sales teams learn what to say and what to avoid to route them more quickly to a closed deal. Chorus unites all your sales team’s conversations into a single view on its dashboard , and then adds intelligence to surface key moments around what works (or doesn’t) in your team’s calls. Chorus integrates with CRM systems, freeing reps from having to take copious notes, and scaling a manager’s ability to coach their team to move deals forward without having to sit in on every single call.

“Chorus is helping us take the guesswork out of the sales process by allowing us to map data to specific outcomes — ultimately shortening sales cycles, improving win rates and beating competitors,” said Kevin McCoy, Sales Director, Marketo. “No other company understands sales and the power of AI like Chorus.”

Why Chorus Matters #

US companies employ over 2.4M inside sales reps (Source: Inside Sales Market Size 2013 Executive Summary.pdf), depending on them to deliver hundreds of billions in revenue. Today, the insights and learning from those conversations are forgotten, or only minimally captured in notes added to CRM systems. Businesses are looking for innovative ways to apply the power of AI and data analysis to improve critical parts of their operations, sales, and marketing. Everything around sales has been optimized except for the calls, which are the most critical and valuable touchpoints with your customers. Yet, most companies know little or nothing about those conversations, which contain the keys to why leads get burned or deals get closed.

Chorus’ founders believe that organizations that capture and act on the insights surfaced from their sales conversations will out-execute their competitors by elevating their entire sales teams, reducing ramp times, and improving decisions based on what customers actually tell the front-line.

“We wanted to apply artificial intelligence in a way that doesn’t replace humans, but instead helps them be more effective — not just more efficient,” said Roy Raanani, Chorus CEO and co-founder. “We saw that no one had yet cracked open the black box of actual sales conversations and felt it was a challenge worth solving. My co-founder Micha Breakstone had spent his career designing speech, natural language and machine learning systems, and laid out a roadmap to solving the problem. Our learning so far from tens of thousands of conversations has been fantastic, so we’re excited for what’s ahead as we learn from more conversations and more customers.”

About Emergence Capital #

Emergence Capital (@emergencecap), based in San Mateo, Calif., is the leading venture capital firm focused on early and growth-stage enterprise cloud companies. Its mission is to invest in cloud visionaries who are building the world’s most important business applications. Emergence has over $900 million under management and is investing out of it’s 4th institutional fund. The firm’s investments include companies such as Salesforce.com (CRM), SuccessFactors (SFSF, acquired by SAP), Veeva Systems (VEEV), Yammer (acquired by Microsoft), and Box (BOX). More information on Emergence Capital can be found at www.emcap.com.