Salesken Raises US$22 Million Funding From Microsoft And Sequoia, To Expand In US Market

(Asia) Salesken, a sales conversation AI startup, has raised US$22 million in its Series B round of funding, led by M12, Microsoft's venture fund. Sequoia India, an existing investor, also participated in this round. Salesken will use the funds to accelerate expansion in the North American market and further develop and scale its proprietary deep-tech product.

Founded in 2020 by Surga Thilakan and Sreeraman Vaidyanathan, Salesken is an in-call live sales intelligence platform. The category-creating product improves performance and revenue per sales representative by providing insights on gaps in their sales calls and bridging the gaps with real-time cues to the reps.

Before founding Salesken, Thilakan and Vaidyanathan spent over a decade training over 20,000 sales reps. They combined their deep domain expertise of sales coaching with cutting-edge engineering and data science to build a product that has seen rapid global adoption over the past two years.

Surga Thilakan, Co-Founder and CEO, Salesken, said, "With the increase in remote selling across industries, digital tools have become a must-have in the sales stack. We created Salesken to make selling scientific and seamless. Salesken transforms teams, providing visibility and actionable insights for higher productivity from day zero. We see onboarding times reduce by 2-3 months through live assistance to sales reps. The quality of sales conversions improve, and the top-line improves by 20-25% within a few months of use. This impact has seen us grow by over 300% last year. We look forward to growing internationally and collaborating with the best talent to help us in our journey of building a world-class product."

Abhi Kumar, Partner at M12, who will be a new board member at Salesken, said, "Mapping customer personas to relevant products, reading customer emotions and delivering relevant playbook-aligned responses is a persistent challenge for inside sales teams. These challenges persist despite existing efforts to improve sales outcomes through training, pre-call preparation and post-call analytics. Salesken is defining the massive category for 'In-Call Sales Intelligence'; it delivers immediate impact, improving conversions across sales organizations by 15-25% within 60 days of go-live. We are super excited to partner with Salesken in helping them serve their global customer base."

Shailesh Lakhani, Partner at Sequoia Capital, said, "Salesken has made great progress since their Series A by showing tangible results to customers in the US and India. The market they operate in is growing rapidly and Salesken's product is rapidly iterating to serve a multitude of sales team requirements. Sequoia India is delighted to continue to support Surga and team Salesken."