Dooly raises $20M to organize sales information with AI

Vancouver, Canada-based Dooly, a startup developing an AI-powered plugin for customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, today announced it has raised just over $20 million, a combination of $3.3 million in seed money and $17 million in a series A round. The company plans to use the capital to scale its platform well into this year, according to CEO Kris Hartvigsen.

Salesforce’s 2019 State of Sales Report found that, on average, salespeople only spend 34% of their day selling products. Among the issues is the disconnect between enterprises’ need for a CRM and the fact that these platforms don’t always map to how salespeople work. According to a recent survey, one of the top barriers to CRM adoption is the amount of manual data entry required. Moreover, it’s estimated that sales professionals spend two-thirds of their office hours on administrative tasks like software management.

Five-year-old Dooly aims to solve this with its connected workspace, establishing workflows that align with the activities of customer-facing teams. It helps sync notes with systems such as Salesforce, Asana, and Slack. Leveraging AI, Dooly updates pipeline and accounts, surfacing real-time information based on the context of customer calls.

“I started Dooly for a number of reasons. I’m a strong believer that the movement of data should be a side effect of a person’s existing workflows, not an administrative chore people are forced to do,” Hartvigsen told VentureBeat via email. “Right now, businesses have tons of data living around the organization, whether it be in Zoom recordings, individual team members’ notes, etc. All that data is rendered useless because it doesn’t talk to existing systems or inform the people that need to be in the know. This has always been a big problem; now, it’s a more urgent one, particularly given the pandemic and the demands that it has put on revenue teams to stay connected, stay up-to-date, deliver clean handovers, etc., all while being mindful that their paycheck is predicated on their performance.”

Above: Dooly’s plugin dashboard.

Image Credit: Dooly

With Dooly, which starts at $25 per user per month, salespeople can attach content from Google Drive or Guru and add Salesforce fields directly to notes. Fields and activities sync to Salesforce and can be shared with a larger team. And Dooly’s AI, which runs on IBM’s Watson cloud platform, identifies new contacts automatically and shows information visually with cards. It also updates deals, scanning what’s typed in a note or said on a call to identify keywords and trigger “kill sheets” or “battlecards.”

“Our voice recognition technology takes playbooks and battlecards to the next level, allowing users to hop on a Zoom call, while Dooly provides real-time, contextual guidance to support their customer conversations,” Hartvigsen said. “Having the ability to respond to customer concerns in the moment gives reps a significant edge to drive deals forward in the right direction. With managers now being further removed from their team in our remote-first world, this greatly improves ramp and sales performance for teams.”

Hartvigsen says in 2020 Dooly expanded during the pandemic, growing to serve teams at Asana, Airtable, BigCommerce, Contentful, Figma, Intercom, Lessonly, Vidyard, and “thousands” more enterprise sales organizations. He said the company hit a net revenue retention rate of 160% and individual usage time of between 2.5 and 5 hours per day. Dooly, which has 22 employees, expects its total headcount to reach 50 employees by the end of 2021.

“Our mission is to create a movement that focuses on building a product where the user is at the center of the story, not the dashboard. By doing this, companies will see the results they had originally hoped for when they implemented big, clunky enterprise platforms. Growth thus far has been precipitated by incredible virality. It’s truly a product-led growth model — this is how we know we’re on the right track,” Hartvigsen said. “With this new capital, we are focusing on executing our plan faster, doubling down on exceptional product experiences that help people become the best version of themselves at work. It starts with acquiring the top talent with a diverse and empathy-driven culture, which we need to create the most human, freeing, and delightful experience for our customers.”

Boldstart Ventures and BoxGroup participated in Dooly’s seed round, while Addition led the series A. Boldstart Ventures, Battery Ventures, BoxGroup, Mantis (in partnership with The Chainsmokers), and SV Angel joined strategic investors Daniel Dines, Brandon Deer, Allison Pickens, Zander Lurie, Jay Simons, Harry Stebbings, and others for the series A.