It's rare that three cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce manage to hear, but today, they're all part of a $ 27 million investment in Tact's C Series. AI, a startup that has been trying to change the way sales people interact with information from CRM systems using voice.
Amazon Alexa Fund, Salesforce Ventures and M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) joined Comcast Ventures as a strategic investor in the business this round. Traditional VCs Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Upfront Ventures also participated. According to Crunchbase, Tact has now raised more than $ 53 million.
Amazon is of course deeply invested in voice interfaces and has recognized what Tact is trying to do in a business environment with this investment. In fact, Tact was one of the first services to be launched as part of Alexa for Business last fall. "Just as people have quickly embraced voice technology at home, we are seeing a huge opportunity for voice services in the business," said Paul Bernard, director of the Amazon Alexa Fund. He sees Tact on the front of this movement.
As to prove the point of view of Amazon, the company also announced a product enhancement to enhance the voice experience in the car. The feature called "Voice Intelligence" acts as a virtual assistant based on a car. Sellers spend a lot of their time in the car, and the tool can not only give them the basics of the next meeting, but it can also provide transaction details and other relevant information, such as recently filed service tickets. All this information can arm the vendor for a potentially more effective meeting, said Chuck Ganapathi, Tact's CEO.
"We want sales professionals who are on the road, who keep their eyes on the road, we send them information and start a conversation, what exactly would a human assistant do," he said. -he declares. ]
Ganapathi understands the limitations of CRM tools perhaps better than anyone else. Indeed, before creating Tact, he had helped build them for more than 20 years: first, custom systems with Ernst and Young, then with Seybold Systems and finally with Salesforce in the cloud.
The value proposition of CRM has always been to provide businesses with a central place for storing customer data, a kind of electronic rolodex, but data entry and retrieval have mostly been a chore for sellers. Ganapathi launched Tact in 2012 with the vision of using voice to facilitate interaction with these tools. He was clearly ahead of his time, but the technology has finally caught up with his idea, and strategic investors in this business certainly recognize the value of a voice interface for sellers.
Ganapathi says that the idea behind Tact is to reduce the friction involved in adding and retrieving information from the database, and make life easier for sales to do their job. If sales professionals can get the information they need, they can potentially make more sales and that's a pretty compelling argument for any business.