Gaurav Bhattacharya came up with his idea for Jeeva AI, a sales tech platform, when he was struggling to keep his last venture afloat.
“Even though we sold to some really large customers, I feel like our downfall was that we were not super good at selling,” Bhattacharya, Jeeva AI’s founder and CEO, said. “It became a very technical, very hard problem for us.”
So, the San Francisco-based company pivoted from a customer intelligence platform, keeping its own problem in mind.
“What we want to build with Jeeva is some kind of companion that truly helps anyone become a really good salesperson,” he said, about the new product. “Just how Cursor is doing with coding.”
The agentic sales platform just raised $9 million in funding from JLL Spark and Sapphire Ventures, along with investments from Jack Altman’s Alt Capital, Marc Benioff, Launch Capital, Bonfire Ventures, Techstars, and Mucker Capital.
The platform, which launched this year, allows individuals or businesses to find leads and customers based on who they’re already in conversation with and craft outreach across channels.
It’s like a “coach” that follows you around on email and phone calls, Bhattacharya said.
Jeeva AI offers two pricing tiers: free and paid, where users can purchase credits in amounts of $20, $50, and $100. It has about 300 paying customers, including real estate giant JLL and energy company Whisper Energy.
To land new customers, the company transferred 2 cents on PayPal to prospective customers with a short note introducing the company and inviting people to share their “2 cents” on the product.
“We got the same amount of negative and positive reactions,” Bhattacharya said. “We sent it to about 250 people, and about 50 of them booked meetings with us, 20 of them became customers. About 50 of them were like, ‘This is the worst strategy, I would never do this again.'”
The company, which employs 20 people, plans to split the $9 million cash injection into two areas: half toward sales and marketing, and the other half toward product by improving its AI models.
Check out the 10-slide pitch deck Jeeva AI used to raise fresh funding:
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