ZoomInfo alum raises $15M for startup that builds AI sales engineers | TechCrunch
Until a year ago, Arjun Pillai had the comfortable yet important role of chief data officer at ZoomInfo, a B2B database company. But the serial entrepreneur was getting antsy.
He had already founded and sold two startups, including Insent, which ZoomInfo bought in 2021. “Once you start a startup, you always have that bug,” he told TechCrunch. Soon after ChatGPT came out, he was ready to launch his own company for the third time. Given that he spent more than a decade running startups or working in sales tech, he was sure that generative AI could help make technical sales faster and more effective. “I couldn’t wait. I had to get out and start the company.”
In August 2023, Pillai left ZoomInfo and launched DocketAI, a virtual sales engineer. On Thursday, the company announced that it raised a $15 million Series A led by Mayfield and Foundation Capital.
While working at ZoomInfo, Pillai noticed that sales engineers, who are technical sales experts, were getting pulled into various conversations with prospective buyers — including some that didn’t require their expertise. A lot of account executives ask them complicated but rather routine questions. “Bringing a sales engineer to every call is expensive, super inefficient, and takes a lot of time,” Pillai said.
So Pillai saw an opportunity to build an AI version of sales engineer. Docket AI helps non-technical salespeople obtain fast answers to technical questions and receive assistance with drafting requests for proposals (RFPs) and other technical documents.
DocketAI doesn’t replace sales engineers, but frees up their time to work “on more interesting, complex and strategic enterprise deals,” Pillai said.
The startup’s AI works by integrating, ingesting and indexing data from over 100 applications used by Docket’s software clients. Pillai emphasized that the company doesn’t train its AI on enterprise data. Docket, just like Glean and Atlassian’s Rovo, acts as a search engine for structured and unstructured workplace data.
But Docket’s AI is different in that it also learns from the actions of top salespeople, Pillai said.
“It’s not just about giving the facts to a buyer,” Pillai said. “Docket learns from top sellers, and it has the ability to scale best practices across the company.”
Pillai claims that sales organizations that use Docket increase productivity and win rates.
The company has been actively selling its product since earlier this year, and is currently adding several new enterprise-level paying customers a month.
“Our smallest customer has 15 seats, and our biggest customers have 10,00 seats,” Pillai said, who added that he counts ZoomInfo and Demandbase among that list.
