Why ONEVC Invested in Patagon AI
We are proud to announce that ONEVC led Patagon AI’s Pre-Seed round, in partnership with 17Sigma.
Patagon is reshaping sales processes in Latin America through GenAI. By replacing costly SDR roles with AI-powered agents, Patagon automates sales qualification, follow-ups, and post-sales operations, providing faster, more efficient results with minimal human intervention. Patagon currently serves companies in the Automotive and Real Estate sectors, where their AI agents have already achieved over 3x higher conversion rates compared to human SDRs, along with significant cost savings.
While marketing has been fully transformed by AI inside Meta’s and Facebook’s ads platforms, sales has largely been left behind.⁽¹²⁾ Sales still rely heavily on Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) to manage lead qualification and perform repetitive tasks. These roles come with high turnover, inconsistent performance, and significant training costs, making them both inefficient and expensive to maintain.⁽³⁾ Additionally, managing leads is challenging because client interactions are often poorly documented and get lost across WhatsApp chats, with 80% of organizations using the platform during lead generation.⁽⁴⁾ Reps manually juggle dozens, if not hundreds, of leads, making missed or delayed responses more likely. Given that 82% of consumers expect an immediate reply,⁽⁵⁾ these delays can significantly hurt conversion rates. Ultimately, disorganized workflows prevent sales teams from efficiently managing large volumes of leads while maintaining high-quality interactions.
The challenges highlighted clearly emphasize the need for sales automation. Patagon addresses this by integrating WhatsApp communications into an AI-powered CRM, centralizing customer interactions while automating reminders, follow-ups, and lead progression tracking. This ensures that (i) leads are promptly addressed, (ii) sales reps can focus on high-value tasks, and (iii) businesses avoid losing potential customers due to disorganized or delayed processes.
As such, AI SDRs bundled with CRM offer critical advantages, including:
- Improved conversion rates: Studies indicate that responding within 1 minute can increase conversion rates by up to 391%, demonstrating the critical importance of speed in sales interaction.⁽⁶⁾
- Reduced operational costs: Automating tasks traditionally handled by large SDR teams significantly reduces operational costs, making processes more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective.
- Increased revenue potential: By augmenting human capacity, AI allows businesses to process far more leads than human-driven workflows, greatly enhancing a company’s ability to generate revenue.
For example, in the automotive sector, an SDR’s goal is to schedule visits to dealerships with the exact car a customer is interested in. Prior to adopting Patagon, dealerships like AutosOK struggled with slow response times and difficulty in matching customer preferences, often missing opportunities.⁽⁷⁾ Patagon’s AI now integrates with dealership inventories, automating the matching process with the dealership’s inventory and scheduling visits seamlessly. As a result, they have doubled their visits, reduced bottlenecks, and significantly improved customer satisfaction by providing faster, more accurate service.
One of the key reasons we chose to back Patagon is their exceptional team, which brings together technical expertise and industry-specific knowledge. David Grandes (CEO) has a proven track record from scaling startups like Zak and Restorando. Cristian Adamo (Tech & Product) has 15+ years in AI, previously leading initiatives at JP Morgan. Roberto Guerrero (Sales) brings deep sales expertise across industries, and Mariano Rey (Growth) brings valuable experience with his background from Botmaker, LatAm’s largest chatbot platform.
Beyond their unique position to execute this thesis, we also believe Patagon’s AI-driven platform creates strong lock-in. While traditional systems of record rely on manual workflows and data storage for defensibility, Patagon goes further and actually becomes the sales workflow for its clients, automating data extraction from unstructured sources like WhatsApp and integrating insights directly into a CRM. This shifts the platform from being a system of record to a system of action.⁽⁸⁾ Patagon is a quintessential case of Vertical AI and exemplifies how a startup can substitute labor-intensive and low-value-added work, so that sales teams can focus on building real relationships with their clients.⁽⁹⁾ ⁽¹⁰⁾ ⁽¹¹⁾ ⁽¹²⁾
For more information, visit: https://www.patagon.ai/
