- The AI startup Attention raised a $14 million Series A funding round from Alven, Eniac, and Frst.
- The startup uses AI and natural language processing to glean data and next steps from sales calls.
- Other startups are bringing AI into the enterprise-software landscape to make sales more efficient.
The New York-based AI startup Attention, which uses natural language processing to fill out customer-relationship-management programs and generate action items from sales calls, just raised a fresh round of funding.
The startup told Business Insider that it had secured a $14 million Series A funding round led by the French venture-capital firm Alven. Its existing investors Eniac, Frst, and Liquid 2 Ventures also participated in the funding round, along with 645 Ventures and Aglaé.
The funds followed a $3.1 million seed round the startup raised when it launched in January 2023.
Attention's founders, Anis Bennaceur and Matthias Wickenburg, met when they were building competing startups. At the time, Bennaceur was building Mixer, a career platform for creative professionals, and Wickenburg was working on its competitor Swipecast. But they bonded over a shared pain point: sales calls.
Sales calls were a nuisance because "it was hard to know what was happening," Bennaceur told BI, adding: "There was nothing to record calls or transcribe the conversation, so it was hard to get volume out of these conversations."
So they forged an alliance and launched Attention in 2021 to help solve the issue.
The duo spent eight months working on the first iteration of Attention, which used artificial intelligence to coach sales representatives. When that version struggled to find product-market fit, they pivoted in mid-2022 to develop a program that used AI to transcribe sales calls and automatically fill out the CRM.
While Swipecast was bootstrapped during its six-year run, Bennaceur and Wickenburg knew that they wanted to go the VC route with Attention to match deeper competition in the enterprise-tech space and hire enough engineering talent to build an AI program.
Attention's AI analyzes sales-team calls and generates action items such as follow-up emails and Salesforce updates. The tech can also identify customers who are a churn risk and provide scorecards.
With its new round of funding, Attention plans to focus on automating more business tasks, with the broader vision of "putting the sales team on autopilot," Bennaceur said.
In addition to filling out a CRM, he envisions a world where his tech prepares handover notes, mitigates churn risks, handles email correspondence and customer tickets, and analyzes the data provided by customer interactions through the sales process.
"We spent a lot of time building an engine," he said. "We want companies to have as lean of a team as possible that generates 100x of the outputs that you used to be able to do before."
Attention is just one of many companies in the growing business of using generative AI to improve sales and supercharge the enterprise-software space.
The late-stage startup Gong, which also records sales calls, raised $250 million in Series E funding in 2021 at a $7.25 billion valuation. And 11x, which is building AI sales reps, raised a $50 million Series B last month from Andreessen Horowitz, TechCrunch reported.
