Led by two ex-sales development representatives (SDRs), Calgary-based Quack has closed $500,000 CAD in pre-seed funding to advance its efforts to build “the cold-calling platform.”
Quack co-founders, CEO Taylor Del Giudice and COO Jacob DiCarlo, previously worked as SDRs at Vancouver-based market intelligence software company Klue. During their time there, Del Giudice said the pair found cold calling to be an often fruitful, but also time-consuming and manual labour-intensive way of booking sales meetings and generating new business.
“We felt the problem personally, and we wanted to fix that.”
Taylor Del Giudice,
Quack
In an exclusive interview with BetaKit, Del Giudice said they went out looking for other platforms in the parallel dialling space to make things easier, but found they either cost too much, were not focused on the needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), or both, and after interviewing some other folks who felt the same way, decided to build an alternative.
“We felt the problem personally, and we wanted to fix that,” Del Giudice said.
Quack’s all-primary, all-equity round closed last month. It was led by Calgary’s Metiquity Ventures—which invested $400,000—with participation from undisclosed angels. It brings Quack’s total funding to $600,000, including past support from Montréal’s FounderFuel, ex-Lightspeed Commerce and Ssense chief technology and product officer Jim Texier, and Simon Wahl, former vice-president of marketing at Flinks.
“At Metiquity, we invest in founders with deep industry experience who intimately understand customer workflows and use that insight to drive product development,” Metiquity co-founder and managing partner Bryan Slauko told BetaKit. “Taylor and Jacob, having worked as SDRs and made thousands of cold calls, know firsthand what their customers need and are building a solution to address those challenges. Early customer traction validates their approach.”
Del Giudice launched the startup in 2023 with DiCarlo, and Amin Safavi, an experienced software developer, joined as Quack’s co-founder and CTO last year.
According to Del Giudice, cold calling typically entails phoning up a large swath of potential customers, connecting with a small portion of them, and booking sales meetings with a fraction of that group.
To put things in perspective, the CEO said that chatting with 10 prospects and booking a single meeting from 100 cold calls marks a “pretty solid” result.
“That means you’ve made 90 dials where you just sat there and waited and waited for it to go to voicemail,” Del Giudice said. He said each of those calls can take upwards of two minutes, plus more time updating customer relationship management (CRM) systems to track them.
RELATED: Forma.ai’s first acquisition nets fellow Toronto sales software startup SeaMonster
Enter Quack, which is developing software that allows customers to cold call multiple prospects simultaneously—up to four currently—using parallel dialling and automated voicemail detection. It also automates updates to CRM platforms like HubSpot, Outreach, and SalesLoft, all towards the goal of helping clients book more meetings in less time.
“If you take a normal SDR … let’s say they make 60 dials in a day—it’s going to take them a few hours to get that done,” Del Giudice said. “We come in and help you be able to call the same [number] of prospects, if not more, in minutes instead of hours.”
The startup’s ultimate ambition is to “be the cold calling platform for not just B2B (business-to-business) tech, but everyone who does cold calls in general,” Del Giudice said.
“Quack has a significant market opportunity, addressing the frustration SDR teams face with complex, expensive enterprise software that doesn’t meet their needs,” Slauko said. “By offering a simple, intuitive solution at an affordable price, Quack is solving a clear problem and making adoption easy for customers.”
RELATED: FinTech startup reach sells majority stake to US-based Primus Capital
Hundreds of SDRs are already using Quack’s platform, including employees at B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies like Suzy, Moengage, Ontop, Ottimate, and Inky. According to Del Giudice, over one million dials have been made using Quack to date.
Quack plans to use this funding to expand and refine its product by implementing artificial intelligence, improving its dialling experience, and offering better analytics, among other things. The startup intends to add two people to its three-person team to support these plans.
The startup, which has generated some traction with SMBs, is beginning to see some interest from enterprises, and plans to allocate some of its capital towards becoming SOC 2 compliant to help it sell to larger companies.
As to where the company’s moniker comes from, Del Giudice credits DiCarlo. He said it was inspired by how annoying cold calling can be sometimes, and thought it was “a fun take” for a company catering to clients in the competitive and often cutthroat world of sales.
“I think cold calling can be fun, and in general, it’s nice to have a good time, especially in sales,” Del Giudice said. “You can’t take yourself too seriously.”
Feature image courtesy Quack.