Microsoft seeks to raise $2 million for a generative AI tool that aids sales teams in gathering buyer intelligence

 Microsoft seeks to raise $2 million for a generative AI tool that aids sales teams in gathering buyer intelligence

Enterprise sales stood out as difficult when Seattle tech veteran Samir Manjure made the switch from engineer to startup CEO. Deal closings frequently took a long time, and the traditional goods did nothing to speed up or simplify the process.

The businessman has since created a technology to handle that issue and has turned it into his second enterprise.

The co-founders of Vieu, a new AI-powered business-to-business sales platform that offers buyer insight and execution tactics, are Manjure and Simon Skaria.

On Wednesday, the Seattle-based business came out of stealth mode with $2 million in additional capital.

Before starting KenSci, a machine learning and AI firm with a focus on healthcare, Manjure worked at Microsoft for more than 17 years. KenSci assisted healthcare organizations in predicting clinical, operational, and financial risks by collecting patient data from various sources. Providence Group bought the business in 2021.

Manjure claimed that he conducted more than 75 interviews regarding closing B2B deals after being motivated by current developments in generative artificial intelligence.

Vieu automates buyer discovery and due diligence to assist enterprise sales teams in finding, connecting with, and pitching to potential customers. The program identifies notable stakeholders in target accounts and then provides advice on how to connect with them. It also offers suggestions for how vendors might provide prospects with their goods or services.

The startup's AI tools have been trained using both Google's Bard and OpenAI's GPT. Manjure said that the business indexed "every single person on the planet" who has a LinkedIn profile in order to train its model. Additionally, the model uses data from roughly 40 different sources.

The objective is to acquire a variety of information about prospective customers to help facilitate more interesting conversations, such as networking, podcast appearances, panel discussions, shared knowledge, and other activities.

According to Manjure, Vieu intends to assist sales professionals in cultivating more individualized outreach and avoiding coming across as spam. According to him, it is a part of a larger effort to get sales teams away from the "spray-and-pray" methodology.

Chatbots and other generative AI tools are criticized for having a high error rate. Manjure claimed that Vieu's AI assigns all information to a source and enables users to fact-check specifics before to contacting customers.

Depending on the source's characteristics, the startup updates its data. For instance, whereas LinkedIn profiles are updated monthly, financial documents like 10-Ks only change a few times a year. Some sources, including news articles, are updated every day. Manjure said that its AI algorithms inform consumers of the data's most recent date.

As the company comes out of hiding, Vieu is being expanded and has roughly 20 customers.

Manjure claimed that the startup faces competition from firms that provide sales intelligence, such ZoomInfo and D&B Hoover. A number of sales technology businesses are also utilizing AI, such as the Seattle startup Outreach, which earlier this year unveiled an email tool for salespeople that was driven by GPT.

According to Manjure, the business wants to act as a kind of all-in-one solution for enterprise sellers by providing intelligence, practical insights, and team observability on a single platform.

The introduction of Vieu comes as enterprise sales teams are shrinking as a result of increasing interest rates and a slowing IT market. Over the past year, there have been layoffs at Seattle-based Highspot and Outreach.

Manjure had a variety of engineering leadership positions at Microsoft in the CRM, Bing, and AI fields.

The company's CTO, Skaria, worked at Microsoft for more than 16 years in a variety of capacities, including SQL, Office 365, Azure AI, and mixed reality. Prior to that, he developed the businesses Office365Mon, which ZScaler purchased, and Albits, which ICICI acquired.

Twenty anonymous angel investors participated in the seed round. Lila Tretikov, a former Microsoft deputy CTO and CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, is an investor. 15 people work for Vieu between the United States and India.