Actively AI raises $22.5M to offer sales ‘superintelligence,’ says AI SDRs failed

AI sales rep startups are a very crowded market these days. If you’re driving into San Francisco from the airport, you’ll probably spot billboards promising that you can “Stop Hiring Humans” (Artisan) or urging you to “Hire Piper, the AI SDR” (Qualified). While some of these startups are certainly growing fast, the field has its challenges and some VCs are wary. Anshul Gupta, co-founder of Actively AI, admits the early versions of these AI sales tools don’t live up to their own hype. Gupta claims classic AI sales reps aren’t the right approach, telling TechCrunch they’ve “failed” by focusing too much “pure volume” – that means contacting as many potential customers as possible. Founded in 2022, Actively AI argues it has a different approach. The startup builds custom ‘reasoning’ models for companies to sift through their data and find the highest-value prospects to sell to, mirroring the work that top human sales reps do. It’s a new way of leveraging reasoning tech, a technique that ... Read full article.