Our Journey with People.ai… and What’s Next
This morning, People.ai announced its $30m Series B. We couldn’t be more thrilled to partner with Oleg Rogynskyy and his team on this journey (see full press release here).
Since our initial investment in People.ai in the fall of 2016, it has been an exhilarating two years. Oleg’s vision for People.ai has thoughtfully expanded since our first investment, and he has grown exponentially as a leader. The additional funding today, led by Andreessen Horowitz, is continued validation of the vision, and all that the team at People.ai has accomplished.
So why is People.ai an important company in the B2B universe?
Every great enterprise company has been built on the back of excellent sales and marketing motion. But even as the world of enterprise sales and marketing have become more data-driven, there is no single platform that brings the data and intelligence sought by sales and marketing under one umbrella. Ask any enterprise CEO, and they’ll tell you that there is a constant struggle between the sales and marketing functions as to who’s contributing more.
Why is this an unsolved problem even in 2018? Enter People.ai. Oleg and his team have built a first-of-its-kind platform that aggregates all sales, marketing and post-sales activity data (email, calendars, phone), provides a unified business activity graph back, and then applies modern AI techniques to enable specific applications around sales, marketing, and customer success alignment, and sales team management as features of the unified data platform. Top tier enterprise companies like New Relic, Tanium, Lyft, Okta, Mulesoft and several others are rapidly adopting People.ai to play offense in their go-to-market efforts.
And they are just getting started. The People.ai team sees a future where the value of their business activity graph extends to all aspects of decision making in an organization, not just sales and marketing.
I’ve been lucky to have had a front-row seat to Oleg’s journey as the founder and CEO of People.ai. Over countless discussions on the company’s product strategy, go-to-market motion, personnel decisions during some tough times and lots of good times, he’s always impressed me with his focused ambition of building an enduring enterprise software company. And I can’t wait to see all that he and his team at People.ai will achieve in the future.
