As a director of sales development for a legal software company, Tony De Leon used to spend hours cold calling prospects only to get their voicemails. It was a tedious job with a great deal of busywork— from finding the right numbers and researching prospects to taking notes and logging calls.
“By the time someone actually connects with you, you’re a little shell shocked,” Leon told Forbes. “You forget everything you’ve ever learned, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, you actually picked up the phone call.’”
Then, Leon started using AI sales platform Nooks to automate manual tasks like finding contact information, leaving voicemails, writing emails and doing research. He said the platform’s dialing assistant has helped him increase the numbers of conversations he had per day from two to 10 — a dramatic improvement on what’s called pipeline generation — sales speak for the process of converting prospects into paying customers. “The sales pipeline is the lifeblood of a company,” Nooks CEO Daniel Lee told Forbes.
Cofounded by Stanford classmates Lee, Rohan Suri and Nikhil Cheerla in 2020, Nooks announced on Thursday it has raised $43 million in Series B funding led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins with participation of Tola Capital and angel investor Lachy Groom. With $70 million in total funding, the startup is now valued at $285 million. Lee claims the company has quadrupled revenue year on year for the last two years, thanks to the tens of thousands of sales representatives from companies like Fivetran and Amplitude who use Nooks’ suite of AI tools.
When the 25-year-old founders launched Nooks during the pandemic, it aimed to be a “virtual office,” a Zoom-like interface where remote teams could collaborate and tune into other people’s calls and join conversations. After they realized that sales teams were Nooks’ power users, the company pivoted to focus on AI tools for sales in 2022. Abandoning its original premise was a prescient decision in hindsight, Lee told Forbes. “You might’ve seen, there’s now more like a graveyard of companies in that space.”
Nooks’ AI platform is built on top of off-the-shelf AI models like OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini and trained on a massive dataset of about 100 million anonymized sales conversations. Nooks also offers coaching tools to help salespeople practice calls beforehand where the AI roleplays as a potential customer, then gives feedback on how to improve. To reduce “tool bloat,” as Lee puts it, the platform integrates with other software that salespeople use everyday like Salesforce and HubSpot.
“In a world where AI can actually do a lot of the work, you don’t want human labor acting as glue between tools because that becomes the bottleneck.” he said.
Nooks is up against tech behemoths like Salesforce, which has its own AI-powered tools geared towards sales reps, and Microsoft, which this week announced that it plans to roll out 10 AI agents — software that can carry out specific tasks— for various business tasks including routine sales functions.
Lee said that Nooks plans to use the new investment to expand its team and improve its product by adding new features for finding leads and eventually help the roughly 3 million sales representatives in the country automate dull aspects of the job and focus on the “strategic parts of selling.”
Leigh Marie Braswell, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who led the firm’s investment in Nooks, first met Lee while they were both working at Scale AI, a $14 billion-valued company that provides data and software to train AI models. She told Forbes that enterprises are looking for applications that can make employees more productive and increase revenues, beyond just a flashy demo — and she hopes Nooks will be able to deliver on that for sales teams. That will “give them more time to focus on the sales job, which is human-centered, strategic work, closing deals and building relationships,” she said.
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