AI startup Vieu secures USD $11m in seed funding for growth

Seattle-based AI startup Vieu has announced the successful completion of an USD $11 million seed funding round, following a year in which customer and revenue metrics more than tripled.

This comes just 12 months after Vieu secured a USD $2 million pre-seed round, highlighting the company's rapid growth trajectory. Among the notable investors in this funding round are Trilogy Equity Partners, Incubate Fund, and Vela Partners, with additional backing from 44 angel investors, including prominent figures from the enterprise software sector.

Vieu's AI-powered Sales Graph technology is designed to streamline enterprise sales processes, offering an alternative to more traditional platforms such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator and conventional CRM systems. By indexing large volumes of relational and industry-specific data, the platform aims to uncover valuable social connections and account intelligence, which can facilitate trust-building with potential customers from the outset of interactions.

The motivation behind Vieu's creation stems from a surge in unsolicited communications within the business sector, as pointed out by Samir Manjure, Vieu's founder and CEO. "It's a 'sales pandemic'. What worked in the last decade to get into new accounts is no longer working for enterprise sellers," Manjure explained.

He highlighted the prevalent challenge faced by sales teams inundated with numerous acceleration tools that fail to tackle the critical task of trust-building with clients.

Vieu's approach seeks to replace outdated outbound methods reliant on unsolicited communications, offering what Manjure terms a "trust-driven approach". The technology serves to help sales teams to secure business meetings more swiftly without the need for extensive cold outreach efforts.

According to Manjure, the platform enables enterprises to engage target customers five times faster and boosts sales productivity threefold.

Sandeep Menon, CEO of Auxia, echoed these sentiments, affirming Vieu's pivotal role in the growth of his business. "Auxia has more than tripled our revenue in about three quarters, and Vieu has been instrumental to that growth," Menon noted. This adaptability is seen as critical amid increasingly intricate B2B buying processes, where multiple stakeholders demand personalised engagement before making purchasing decisions.

Simon Skaria, co-founder and CTO of Vieu, elaborated on the technological underpinnings of the company's offerings. "Two secular trends are playing out in the market. First, buyers are getting ROI conscious... Second, LLMs have become 100X more effective, affording us superpowers to mint gold from our proprietary data sources." These advancements have enabled Vieu to compete with existing market tools through a more sophisticated graph-based semantic platform.

The current market climate, characterised by reduced budgets and ineffective legacy tools, has made the need for innovative sales solutions more pressing, according to Chuck Stonecipher, Managing Director at Trilogy Equity Partners. Stonecipher remarked, "Enterprise deals need a warm and informed approach.

We believe that the B2B sales will move more towards the Vieu way of selling, one that's driven by trusted relationships."

Vieu's ultimate goal is to merge its trusted business network with CRM capabilities, aiming to establish an unprecedented ecosystem for B2B relations.

Manjure outlined this vision: "Our vision is to make Vieu the go-to platform where trust is cultivated, leveraged, and transformed into meaningful business relationships and opportunities." This fusion of technologies is positioned to address contemporary challenges in enterprise sales, amidst a landscape demanding more effective and trust-centric methodologies.