Vancouver-based Dooly.ai has raised $2 million to help sales professionals reduce time spent on administrative tasks using AI.
The round was led by ScaleUP Ventures, with participation from Panache Ventures, Pallasite Ventures, and New Avenue Capital. Dooly.ai’s platform syncs digital notes, fields, and tasks straight to Salesforce, while providing salespeople and customer success teams with the information they need in real-time based on a support rep’s conversations. The goal is to eliminate manual updating and the need to do tedious “note transfer” into various databases.
“ScaleUP is excited to lead the seed round into Dooly,” said Derek Spratt, partner at ScaleUP Ventures. “They are effectively helping build a next-generation CRM platform in a really creative way—by wrapping an AI front-end onto existing platforms like Salesforce—making CRM an enjoyable and powerful corporate tool rather than a soul-sucking data-entry chore. It doesn’t matter what industry you look at, CRM is the mandated platform for customer interfacing and related corporate reporting. The addressable market is really infinite.”
“Equally, there’s an opportunity to scale into legal, and HR, and finance.”
Dooly.ai was co-founded in 2016 by CTO Justin Vallaincourt and CEO Kris Hartvigsen. Speaking with BetaKit, Hartvigsen said he came across this issue during his 10 years at Vision Critical, where he led several sales teams in roles like EVP of strategic alliances and general manager of products.
“When I was managing teams there, you see the range of people that are doing their jobs in different geographies and different roles,” Hartvigsen said. “That’s when you need to see information in deals, so you can help coach and advocate for them back to the business. What I found is that that process was so manual. Sixty-five percent of a salsperson’s time is spent in non-selling activies.”
The company plans to use the funding to invest in its product development. Hartvigsen said the platform won’t be just a database to store information, but offer “knowledge in motion” so sales reps can access the information they need in real-time to close sales. Specifically, Dooly is investing in its sales and marketing teams.
“What we’re building right now is that knowledge automation component.”
“What we have today is the ability to deliver information broadly to the business, and what we’re building right now is that knowledge automation component. So if a key word or something that happened in your conversation triggered something in the knowledge base, that would be delivered to our feed,” he said.
Hartvigsen said the company is committed to growing in Canada, and that the company had the opportunity to take money from Silicon Valley, but opted to have an round with a significant Canadian presence.
“There might be a point in time where we’d do parts of the business in the Valley, probably a sales component but maybe an AI component because there tends to be a lot of talent down there that you want to leverage,” Hartvigsen said. “But for the most part, we’ve been well-supported by the Canadian government through SR&ED and IRAP, and as you change your mix, those opportunities can go away. Frankly, the wages in the Valley are pretty extraordinary, they’re a lot higher than what you have to have in Vancouver for similar talent. It’s not that we’re not trying to pay as competitively as possible, it just means that we’re trying to be a responsible company as well and not having to pay the premium you’d have to pay in the Valley.”
Hartvigsen said the platform could expand beyond just customer success teams and into other industries that require diligent note-taking and tracking.
“Equally, there’s an opportunity to scale into legal, and HR, and finance, if you’re taking meetings and holding meetings today internally or externally, you’re typically capturing information in those meetings and you need to action that information.”