Israeli SaaS company Gong.io, which is pioneering B2B Sales Conversation Intelligence field, has emerged from stealth mode and announced $6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners and Check Point cofounder Shlomo Kramer. Gong.io uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help B2B sales teams win more deals by recognizing effective patterns from tens of thousands of hours of spoken sales conversations.
Serial entrepreneurs CEO Amit Bendov and CTO Eilon Reshef co-founded Gong to fill a significant void they noticed in the market while managing some of the most successful hyper-growth startups. Previous companies where Bendov served as CEO and senior executive (Sisense, Panaya, and ClickSoftware) have grown from zero traction to over $1 billion in combined value. CTO Reshef previously co-founded Webcollage, a SaaS used by over 1000 of the world's top brands.
Bendov said, "We believe Gong's technology is the most significant invention for sales since the invention of CRM. Trillions of marketing dollars have been poured into reaching, nurturing, and contacting leads. But 80% of those hard-earned leads are lost after the first few phone conversations with a sales person. Gong solves that problem, pioneering a new category of solutions."
He added, "The average B2B sales conversation runs 6000 words per hour, sales people hold around 20-30 conversations per week, and managers are often responsible for 6-12 reps -- impossible math if you're trying to gain a deep understanding of all those calls. Gong provides visibility so sales executives and reps can understand what's happening on every single call."
"There's one big gap with current business intelligence solutions: analyzing unstructured data from conversations such as customer communications, job interviews and company meetings," said Dror Nahumi, General Partner, Norwest Venture Partners. "Gong.io aims to lead this new category using state-of-the-art multi-disciplinary technologies. The first opportunity for Gong.io is B2B sales, where optimization via analytics results in higher conversion and huge ROI."
Over the last 9 months, while still in stealth mode, Gong has developed and deployed its Sales Conversation Intelligence solution in dozens of organizations and already has significant sales.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 21, 2016
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