1up emerges from stealth with $2.5M for sales AI

One factor about gross sales that anybody who has labored within the enterprise can in all probability attest to is that salespeople spend plenty of time answering completely different variations of the identical questions and filling out many various request-for-proposal (RFP) types with related data.

However with the appearance of generative AI, the query turns into: how a lot of that always tedious and repetitive, but dynamic and extremely specialised work, could be automated?

A good portion, based on 1up. Rising from stealth right this moment with $2.5 million in funding from 8-Bit Capital, RRE Ventures, Alumni Enterprise Companions, Italmobilliare, and Aviso Ventures, the corporate is a New York Metropolis-based startup based by George Avetisov, who serves as its CEO. It’s coming to market with its “Information Automation Platform” software program designed for gross sales groups.

“Generative AI is usually regarded as a instrument for writing copy and creating photos,” mentioned Manoj Abraham, co-founder & Head of Product at 1up, in a press assertion. “At 1up, we’re interested by how this know-how can be utilized to automate data. We consider there’s an entire new stage of productiveness that may be unlocked by accelerating the circulation of knowledge throughout the enterprise.”

How 1up’s Information Automation Platform works

In response to 1up’s web site, “gross sales groups wrestle with the ache of getting correct data after they want it most” to reply buyer questions and objections and fill out RFPs.

1up seeks to offer product data to gross sales staff members by way of a pure language processing (NLP) conversational chatbot interface that references its clients’ information throughout a number of sources, together with Google Drive, Field and Confluence.

1up can present the solutions to gross sales staff members as messages from its chatbot, which seems as one other person of their collaboration apps of selection — Salesforce’s Slack and Microsoft Teams are each supported to start out.

A few of the instance hypothetical questions 1up says it will possibly reply on-demand inside a number of seconds for gross sales groups embrace:

• “What’s case research of ours I can use to shut a banking buyer?”
• “Why did we lose that Fortune 500 deal to our competitor final quarter?”
• “How do I reply if a buyer asks about our SOC2 compliance?”
• “What docs ought to I exploit to deploy our product in Kubernetes?”

Differentiation by design

Though different corporations have supplied AI-powered gross sales enablement and gross sales staff data instruments, 1up seeks to distinguish itself by way of a number of key options.

An enormous one is the power for customers to ask a number of questions without delay, not like most massive language mannequin (LLM) purposes equivalent to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama 2, which solely enable one query to be requested and answered at a time.

Help for a number of questions is what makes 1up capable of assist gross sales staff members rapidly fill out RFPs. As a substitute of going query by query or field-by-field within the RFP kind and attempting to cobble collectively all that data, gross sales brokers can now simply copy/paste and ship all of the inquiries to their 1up chatbot and get the responses they want.

1up says it additionally makes use of guardrails that restrict hallucinations from its generative AI-powered responses. The 1up Information Automation Platform makes use of an organization’s inside information and data, then applies a number of LLMs atop it to fetch and retrieve related data in its solutions to gross sales staff questions.

“The questions flowing by way of 1up each day rely on delicate inside data,” reads the corporate’s press launch. “They can’t be Googled, can’t be requested of an AI, and can’t be simply automated.”

Pricing for 1up’s services begins at $249 per 30 days for as much as 5 customers, $849 per 30 days for as much as 50 customers, and up from there for bigger enterprises.