Chatbot vendor Insent.AI closed on a $2 million seed round “to help mid-market B2B companies improve how they identify and communicate with potential buyers.” The firm, which competes against Intercom, Terminus Chat, and Drift, calls itself a “human-first chatbot.”
Insent said that it isn’t “just building a chatbot that generates leads, but a collaborative platform that is going to help marketers create, nurture qualified opportunities, and shorten sales cycles.”
The goal is to remove “digital walls” between buyers and sellers by replacing web forms and follow-ups “with instant live conversations on websites” that schedule meetings and deliver “personalized content recommendations based on engagement history.”
Insent describes itself as an “integration first platform,” with MAPs, CRMs, and ABM Platforms “to help sales teams talk to engaged prospects while they’re on the website.”
According to Insent Digital Marketer Aatharsha Jey, “integrations should be planned and carried out in a way that does not ask people to change their behaviors in order to adopt a new tool.”
“By guiding their buyers at the right time and proactively alerting your salespeople, Insent generates new revenue opportunities and accelerates existing ones,” said CEO Arjun Pillai.
Emergent Ventures led the round with participation from BAM Ventures, TechStars, Arka Venture Labs, Arali Ventures, and Bizable founder Aaron Bird. Funds will be deployed to expand its chatbot integrations and add engineering, sales, and marketing headcount. Another area of development is improving its visitor data intelligence to improve personalization.
“We believe the B2B sales process currently has unnecessary friction for both buyers and sellers,” said Anupam Rastogi, Partner at Emergent Ventures. “As an increasing proportion of sales is digitally intermediated and more leads are generated online, we believe Insent has a tremendous opportunity to help both buyers and sellers do their work more effectively and connect seamlessly.”
Initially, the pandemic slowed Instent’s growth as marketing teams reduced budgets and delayed decisions, but chatbots are high on the list of MarTech digital acquisition solutions. Since May, revenue has quadrupled.
Aaron Bird, former VP at Adobe and CEO of Bizable, remarked that marketing had undergone two major paradigm shifts over the past few years, the rise of ABM and a focus on the buyer experience at the heart of the sales process; however, “companies are yet to start adapting to this paradigm. Insent is a key piece of the puzzle to help them do so.”
Insent stress-tested various platforms before settling on MongoDB and AWS. Pillai contends that the platform gives them a five-year or six-year window before rearchitecting. The platform was designed with an account-based, versus lead-based, architecture that ties leads to accounts for account-based orchestration.
“So, the architecture is obviously manually decided. But as far as the scaling is concerned, it is all automated,” said Pillai. “There are enough database services that will enable us to run automated services of scaling up and scaling down … to make sure that when you are sleeping if a customer connects a 10 million [record] database, the system scales up.”
Insent is using 6Sense for visitor identification. “We go and task 6Sense through an API,” said Pillai. “We take that data, and we do further processing of that data. All of this happens in microseconds. Basically, the moment somebody lands on the website, boom, the API call comes back with the data based on that website, company visitor.”
Insent was founded in 2018 and has forty employees in the US, Canada, and India.