Amazon, Microsoft, and Comcast back Tact.ai in $27 million funding round to expand its sales platform

Tact.ai, a Redwood City, California-based enterprise intelligence startup, announced today that it has closed a $27 million funding round led by Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Microsoft’s M12, Salesforce Ventures, and Comcast Ventures. The infusion of capital comes shortly after the opening of the company’s new headquarters in the United Kingdom and development center in Bengaluru, India.

“Sales professionals need a way to control their data and coordinate with people, whether on a phone, smart speaker, or in-car,” Tact.ai founder and CEO Chuck Ganapathi said in a statement. “We’re pleased to work with world-class investors and global companies like Comcast, Amazon, and Salesforce.com to execute on our vision of a conversational and voice-driven enterprise for sales teams.”

Tact.ai’s eponymous Tact Assistant leverages the power of artificial intelligence to unify disparate sales tools, like LinkedIn, Microsoft Office 365, email, calendars, address books, and Salesforce. With Tact.ai’s smartphone app for Android and Alexa; Alexa and Cortana skills; Google Action; and chatbots for Microsoft Teams, WebEx Teams, and Slack, salespeople can manage deal flows and customer interactions conversationally without having to juggle multiple windows and software.

In addition to the funding round, Tact Assistant announced two new product offerings: Voice Intelligence, which brings the Tact Assistant’s natural language capabilities to cars, and Intelligent workspace, a unified seller dashboard.

Tact Assistant’s standout feature, according to the company, is “adaptive organizational ontologies.” Unlike general-purpose assistants, such as the Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri, Tact understands enterprise terminology and is trained to “support discussions tailored to the sales domain.” It’s also highly versatile: It can notify sellers about urgent items proactively and switch between topics without skipping a beat, and it incorporates knowledge about each user — including their preferences and past conversation history — in order to better understand and predict intent.

Intelligent Workspace, meanwhile, offers a unified sales workflow with document collaboration, e-signature functionality, and live meeting spaces. A handy AI assistant — powered by Voice Intelligence — connects to application data.

“Sales software wasn’t designed for today’s environment, where sellers can no longer afford to get stuck shuffling between different apps looking for the right combination of data and insights,” Cisco Systems executive Luca Felli said. “Tact.ai’s ability to meet sellers within their daily workflow of activities delivers a frictionless, 360-degree experience when most needed — at the ‘edge’ of customer interactions.”

Today’s funding round brings Tact.ai’s total to $57 million. Existing investors Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Upfront Ventures also participated.