AI startup Sailes closes $5.1M Series A to add jobs, enhance sales bot offering

By Leslie Collins – Specials editor, Kansas City Business Journal

Kansas City-based Sailes Inc., formerly Saile, has closed a $5.1 million Series A round that will expand its headcount.

The artificial intelligence startup developed patent-pending technology that creates sales robots, known as Sailebots, that mirror the personality of individual sales execs. Sailebots can perform tasks such as marketing automation, finding and verifying decision-makers, and reading responses and reacting to them in a way that can drive revenue. Ultimately, they allow sales employees to trade tedious tasks for more meaningful activities.

St. Louis-based early-stage venture capital firm Lewis & Clark Ventures led the round. Acronym Venture Capital and Tenzing Capital also participated, as did existing investors KCRise Fund and Valor Ventures. Founded in 2019, the startup has raised $6.6 million to date.

One aspect that stood out to investors amid a tough fundraising climate is the company's capital efficiency, Sailes co-founder and CEO Nick Smith told the Kansas City Business Journal.

“One of the comments we heard a lot from investors was how great our burn ratio is, meaning we’re always generating more revenue than burned,” Smith said. “It’s really exciting. We’ve been getting affirmation of our product market fit from our customers for years, and the fact that investors took notice and saw that we were not just another AI company, but one that’s solving an actual problem, is great affirmation as well.”

Since its launch, Sailes has netted triple-digit annual revenue growth and has gained “significant” Fortune 500 adoption in industries such as manufacturing, corporate governance, real estate and heavy equipment, he said.

The latest funding round will only fuel the startup’s growth. A chunk of the money will be used to expand its roughly 20-person employee base, Smith said. In the next six months, it plans to double its sales team from four to eight people and add six to 10 employees throughout its machine learning, engineering and product teams. It also plans to add at least two marketing employees.

In addition, the round will help Sailes enhance its machine learning capabilities and grow its presence in New York, where its second office is located.

Earlier this month, Sailes released its Starboard product, which allows enterprise sales teams to build, manage and deploy a fleet of Sailebots, including training them to their liking. With the launch of Starboard, Sailes has reached an inflection point: The market is ready for that level of control, Smith said.

Sailes is helping companies address key challenges, including not enough employees to chase leads or serve customers. Even if a company has a sizable sales team, it can struggle with maximizing productivity, he said.

In a release, Lewis & Clark Ventures described Sailes as a “first mover” in using AI to fully automate lead generation and prospecting activities for enterprise sales teams.

“With so much buzz around AI, it was incredibly validating to hear customers rave about the actual value, in terms of both sales pipeline creation and labor efficiency, the platform provides,” Lewis & Clark Ventures principal Michael Rockhold said in the release. “As evidenced by their tremendous growth and marquee customer logos, Sailes is experiencing a strong pull from the market. Additionally, Nick and team embody all of the characteristics we look for when backing early-stage founders. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with the business.”