San Francisco, California , Oct. 15, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In an era where companies are rushing to automate customer interactions, FullyRamped is going against the grain. The Silicon Valley startup has raised $2.3 million to upskill sales representatives with AI role-play using Practice Prospects.
The pre-seed funding round was led by BoxGroup, MaC Venture Capital, and NOMO Ventures. Additional investment came through the scout funds of Greylock and Sequoia. This early-stage funding will be used to expand the team, enhance the product, and accelerate the company's go-to-market strategy.
Designed for sales representatives and their managers, FullyRamped's platform provides AI-powered "Practice Prospects" - custom personas that sales reps can engage with to refine their skills in an environment that mimics the progression of a real sales call. Notably, the platform uses real-time voice AI to offer natural conversations with minimal latency, providing companies with a safe, controlled manner to adopt AI in their sales training processes. This allows representatives to practice their pitch and objection handling with a variety of personas without burning real leads. Essentially, it offers infinite opportunities without the constraints of manager or teammate availability. This dramatically streamlines the upskilling process, ensuring sales reps are battle-ready when they join real calls with real stakes.
FullyRamped creates more surface area for coaching and feedback
FullyRamped was founded by Aaron Marks, a Stanford engineer specializing in Natural Language Processing. He was previously employee #2 at Skiff (acquired by Notion earlier in 2024) and left his role as a Growth Manager at Verkada to start FullyRamped.
FullyRamped founder: Aaron Marks
The concept began as a prototype that he built, enabling sales reps to call live phone numbers and practice their phone skills on-demand in a simulated cold call environment. This early test laid the foundation for what would become FullyRamped's comprehensive AI-powered training platform. Aaron Marks, CEO and founder of FullyRamped recalls “the best part was using it myself; I learned how to sell FullyRamped over the phone, by using my own product.”
Today, sales training is largely done through internal sales academies, which come with high costs and extended time commitments. FullyRamped introduces AI to this traditional process, shortening the ramp time for new representatives, reducing the number of potential leads lost during training, and increasing conversation-to-meeting-booked ratios. The company’s platform is designed to complement, not replace, traditional role-play exercises, to offer a comprehensive training solution. Ultimately, by providing an entirely new medium for training, FullyRamped allows companies to sidestep the typical drawbacks of developing the sales skills of junior cohorts.
"Our goal is to help companies develop their human capital," commented Aaron Marks. "We believe that AI is a tool that will be used by humans, not replace them. People still prefer talking to people, especially in high-stakes B2B sales conversations."
Despite only launching over the summer, FullyRamped already has paying customers. Technology companies with sales-led motions are using FullyRamped to onboard and train their Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). Early adopters in the tech-sales sector have reported strong results, with the platform seeing promising growth since launch.
While FullyRamped is currently focused on tech sales, the company's vision extends to serving all external-facing roles. "When you build software, you would never test in production," Aaron Marks explained. "So, why don’t we give everyone with a “people-job” a staging environment too?"
As FullyRamped continues to grow, FullyRamped is set to give customer-facing employees the sandbox they need to practice ahead of high-stakes conversations – without the threat of being replaced.
David Tisch, managing partner at BoxGroup commented: "FullyRamped has identified a clear market need and built a solution with the potential to redefine the way we do business. We're excited by Aaron and his vision for the future."
Adrian Fenty, founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital added: “FullyRamped is poised to be one of the breakthrough voice-first agentic platforms. Aaron's vision for AI role play has great potential for augmenting, not replacing, a large share of human work."
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About FullyRamped
FullyRamped is an AI role play platform for sales teams. Sales leaders empower their reps with FullyRamped’s custom Practice Prospects, leading to a faster ramp to productivity and more surface area for coaching and feedback. For more information please visit: https://fullyramped.com/
About BoxGroup
BoxGroup is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm based in New York and San Francisco. For the last 15 years, BoxGroup has backed founders at the earliest stage of their businesses, investing collaborative checks alongside other funds and angels. The firm has made more than 400 investments in companies across all sectors of software and technology, including early investments in Plaid, Ramp, Warp, Flatiron Health, Solugen, and many more.
About MaC Venture Capital
Founded in 2019, MaC Venture Capital is a venture capital firm based in Los Angeles, California. MaC invests in technology startups leveraging shifts in cultural trends and behaviors. Since inception, the firm has invested in over 100 companies across a multitude of sectors, including enterprise software, aerospace & defense, marketplaces, logistics, infrastructure, and media.
