Why We Invested in Orum
Today, Craft Ventures is excited to announce that we are leading the $25 million Series A in Orum, a “smart dialer” for enterprise sales teams that uses AI to automate sales activities, helping to detect voicemails, filter out bad numbers, and navigate phone directories. This added efficiency of cutting out dialing time and replacing it with talk time can make all the difference in whether an outbound motion works for an enterprise sales team.
The average salesperson is expected to make hundreds of dials per week, only to have a handful of conversations and maybe a few new opportunities created. This process can be soul-crushing, consuming hours and hours of human time. Orum filters out every single manual calling action so that sellers are left with only the high leverage tasks: having actual conversations with live prospects. Sales is a game of efficiency and execution. Orum gives its users a serious, unfair advantage.
Orum gets sales reps into more live conversations and automates away all of the manual calling effort to make outbound dialing as efficient as email outreach. They integrate with CRMs (Salesforce, Salesloft Outreach) to pull in customer information while dialing up to 10 numbers at once, navigating complex phone trees, filtering out bad numbers, and automatically leaving pre-recorded voicemails. When a prospect answers the call, the rep is then prompted to join for a live conversation with the customer’s information and notes in front of her.
I think of Orum as a secret weapon for sales teams, a perception that was confirmed when I spoke to customers who were beyond thrilled with Orum’s impact on sales rep performance and didn’t want their competitors to know about it. What’s better than a product so good that customers want to tell everyone about it? A product so good that customers are scared their competition will find out about it!
When I first saw the demo for Orum, I was blown away and wished I had it both personally as a sales rep and for my team when I built out Reddit’s sales organization.
Outbound calling is a broken process — an inefficient time-suck that most salespeople hate. Orum co-founder and CEO Jason Dorfman was the first sales hire at Rubrik, where he built the inside sales organization — dozens of reps making hundreds of calls every day but only actually getting a handful of people live on the phone. So when he met his co-founder and CTO, Karthik Viswanathan, they dug deeper into the problem and decided to build a next-generation dialing platform for sales teams. Today, Orum is processing ~2 million calls per month on their platform.
Orum’s momentum is a testament to the incredible product-market and founder-market fit. The company has all the components of a market leader. Customers are raving about it, and so are we. Thank you, Jason, Karthik, and the entire Orum team, for allowing us to join the Orum journey.
