AI startup Nooks has raised a new round of funding. It announced a $22 million Series A fundraising effort led by former Stripe executive Lachy Groom and contributions from Tola Capital and others. The company plans to use this new cash infusion to further its goal of improving the productivity of the estimated three million inside sales representatives in the U.S.

Founded by Dan Lee during the pandemic, Nooks seeks to automate repetitive tasks sales reps frequently undertake. To accomplish this, it deploys natural language processing and other AI models to analyze sales calls, summarize customer interactions and provide strategic insights to improve salespeople's performance.

"It's superpowers for sales reps," Lee tells VentureBeat. "The analogy that I like to give is farmers, where farmers used to be manual laborers, plowing fields and stuff. And now they're more like scientists, where they're measuring soil compositions, improving processes and increasing yields. The reason is that machines like plows and tractors helped elevate them from being more like manual laborers to this much higher leverage type of job. There are a lot fewer farmers today and there's a lot more food. That's basically the direction that we expect the sales job to go, particularly the area of sales that we focus on, pipeline generation."

Image credit: Nooks

Nooks wasn't always focused on the sales team. The initial idea was to build a collaboration platform for remote workers to make work in the digital space smarter and more effective than in real life. However, it failed to gain traction largely due to the post-pandemic transition back to the office, but realized the company's most engaged users were sales teams. That ultimately led Nooks to pivot to explore feedback loops for salespeople.

"Feedback loops are super helpful — understanding what works and what doesn't. You have a bunch of people selling the same product with the same pitch to the same personas, answering the same questions, hopefully, the same way. So you want to figure out really quickly what works and what doesn't," Lee says. He goes on to mention there are many manual and repetitive pieces of the sales job AI is good at tackling today. All this informed Nooks it wasn't enough to address feedback loops but also "how much higher leverage you can make people."

Image credit: Nooks

The AI platform helps representatives avoid the mechanical parts of sales calls such as skipping past numbers when a human being doesn't pick up. It also provides notetaking, call logging and invalidating when there's bad contact information. For example, Nook will automatically flag the call if you dial John Doe but get a voicemail greeting referencing Jane Smith.

Lee explains that this allows sales representatives to focus more on their conversations. There are features within Nooks that help teams figure out what to say on a call, research what went into securing that opportunity, and determine the priorities, timelines and objectives mentioned by the potential customer. Call transcription and scoring are also included.

Customers can integrate their Nooks accounts with CRM platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot and sales engagement platforms like Outreach, SalesLoft and Apollo.

Nook's strategy appears to be working, as the startup has over 200 company customers. Lee hopes his company will be the "all-in-one platform for sales calls at the top of the funnel" and can significantly impact productivity.

It has now raised more than $26 million in venture funding.