Seattle, Washington, Oct. 03, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- “I love receiving spam - I want more of it” said no one ever. With the advent of Gen AI tools that are capable of sending thousands of spam messages with cleverly crafted subject lines in seconds, spam is no longer just a consumer problem; it has infiltrated the business world. Business leaders and top executives saw a stark increase in cold outreach attempts over the last year, receiving on average 80+ cold emails per week, with a less than 1% success rate. The problem has escalated from worse to unimaginable.
Addressing the challenge, AI-startup Vieu today announced a $11m funding round to scale its AI-powered trusted business network with a singular goal: to fast-track enterprise sales. This follows a period of hypergrowth; over the past 12 months, customer and revenue numbers have more than tripled, including several marquee publicly listed organizations. The seed round was led by Trilogy Equity Partners with participation from Incubate Fund and Vela Partners. In addition to the institutional investors, 44 angel investors, including prominent founders, CEOs, and sales leaders from the enterprise software industry, have also invested in this round.
Vieu founders: Simon Skaria and Samir Manjure
As more VC-backed companies chase efficient growth, there’s been a significant cut back on acquisition spending. With smaller budgets and failing legacy techniques and tools, sales leaders are trying to build robust pipelines to meet topline targets. In an era of constrained sales budgets, Vieu brings a unique and fresh perspective to the world of enterprise sales - an approach based on trust, building meaningful relationships, and adding value from the first touch point with the customer. Vieu is a first-of-its-kind AI-powered business network that replaces outdated “spray and pray” cold outbound methods, offering a novel way to get connected to the buying committee at scale and truly fast-tracking your enterprise pursuits at scale.
Vieu’s founder and CEO, Samir Manjure, said: “It’s a ‘sales pandemic’. What worked in the last decade to get into new accounts is no longer working for enterprise sellers. Today’s sales teams are buried under a blanket of sales acceleration tools but none that solve for building trust with customers. Our mission is to help salespeople get to the first business meeting faster without dozens of cold calls or emails, while building trust with the buyer in the process. The ability to secure trust, leverage networks, and land business meetings with the buying committee is just the beginning; we’re creating a real business network.”
Illustrated: Vieu's AI Sales Graph
According to Salesforce’s State of Sales Report 2024, sellers spend 70 percent of their time on non-selling tasks - 26 percent on the prioritization of opportunities, preparation and planning, and researching prospects. Vieu helps enterprise sellers save time by providing a consistent, qualified pipeline of potential clients. It creates hyper-personalized account handbooks for every opportunity, identifies key stakeholders and buying committee members, and constructs detailed buying committees. This eliminates data chaos by building easy-to-use account plans for sellers to secure meetings with key stakeholders.
Behind Vieu’s deceptively simple experience are multiple technological breakthroughs. Simon Skaria, Vieu’s founder and CTO, explains, “Two secular trends are playing out in the market. First, buyers are getting ROI conscious on investments like 6Sense, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, & Outreach. Second, LLMs have become 100X more effective, affording us superpowers to mint gold from our proprietary data sources. The result is an all-in-one business graph that disrupts incumbents built on list-based declarative tools towards our graph-based semantic platform.”
Samir Manjure and Simon Skaria, both veterans from Microsoft, have deep expertise in the enterprise software and startup ecosystem. They were inspired to build Vieu after meeting nearly 100 sales leaders, who revealed that their teams were using a dozen different tools, yet after half a year of pursuing accounts, many were still dissatisfied with their enterprise efforts and failing to meet their quotas.
“I experienced this problem firsthand while building my previous company. How do I create a steady pipeline and how to convert them efficiently to topline impact? 9 out of every 10 business leaders in my network echo this concern. The current strategies and legacy tools that relied heavily on outreach via email, cold calls, or LinkedIn are no longer working,” added Samir Manjure. "Vieu’s trust-driven approach is delivering results that cold outreach simply can't match. We're seeing our customers secure first meetings with target enterprise customers five times faster, while increasing their sales team productivity threefold. This is what's possible when you replace old legacy spray-and-pray methods with trusted introductions from the Vieu Network”.
Vieu’s customers seem to agree. Sandeep Menon, CEO of Auxia, an AI platform for B2C Growth, says, “If you need true revenue, you need a top-down Enterprise Sales motion. For top-down high-value Enterprise GTM, there is no better tool than Vieu. Auxia has more than tripled our revenue in about 3 quarters, and Vieu has been instrumental to that growth. My team gets to focus on building and selling, and not deploying and operating sales tools. That's the value".
Vieu’s rise coincides with the increasing complexity of B2B buying processes and growing resistance to unsolicited pitches. Its AI-powered solution provides a scalable approach to building trust in enterprise sales at a time when purchasing decisions involve multiple stakeholders and demand more personalized, value-driven engagement.
“With legacy tools and techniques proving obsolete, the GTM & sales tech landscape is undergoing a significant transformation and is ripe for disruption. While we explored multiple start-ups solving for this space, we strongly believe that Vieu is solving for the right problem at the right time with the right approach,” said Chuck Stonecipher, Managing Director at Trilogy Equity Partners. “Enterprise deals need a warm and informed approach. We believe that the B2B sales will move more towards the Vieu way of selling, one that’s driven by trusted relationships.”
Vieu's ultimate goal is to fuse its trusted business network with CRM capabilities, creating an unprecedented ecosystem for B2B relationships.
"Our vision is to make Vieu the go-to platform where trust is cultivated, leveraged, and transformed into meaningful business relationships and opportunities." says Samir Manjure.
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Notes to the editor
Media images can be found here.
About Vieu
Cofounded by Samir Manjure and Simon Skaria, Vieu uplevels every sales pursuit into faster, bigger strategic wins. Samir previously was founder and CEO of KenSci (acquired by Providence Group) and has held various positions at Microsoft for over 17 years. Simon has founded and sold 2 startups previously – Albits (acquired by ICICI), and Office365Mon (acquired by ZScaler) and has also held various positions at Microsoft for 16 years.
About Trilogy Equity Partners
Trilogy Equity Partners is a Bellevue, Washington-based early-stage venture capital firm led by former entrepreneurs and operators. With a 17-year founder-first track record, we take a long-term approach to helping entrepreneurs build extraordinary businesses. For more information, please visit www.vieu.com or follow Vieu on LinkedIn
