A couple of years ago, when Warmly first emerged, people were regularly convening on Zoom, and the company offered customized backgrounds and participant information. While this service had its merits, the founders encountered challenges when attempting to sell this concept. Consequently, they decided to pivot towards a new idea: providing valuable leads to sales departments by delivering data on individuals actively in the process of making a purchase on a website.
Today, the company has revealed an $11 million Series A funding round to further develop this vision. The round was led by Felicis, with participation from NFX, Zoom Ventures, F-Prime Capital, Maven Ventures, and other undisclosed investors.
Max Greenwald, the co-founder and CEO of Warmly, explains that this new product arose from their struggles in selling their initial offering. He states, “We essentially realized that it was challenging to sell, and given our company name, ‘Warmly,’ we aimed to take a more personable approach. This led us to focus on the company’s revamp, an autonomous sales platform that streamlines the tedious tasks of salespeople and aids in pinpointing the most promising leads.”
The Warmly solution combines various sales tools to identify leads. It integrates metadata from platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Outreach, and Salesloft, and augments this with intent data from sources such as 6sense, Clearbit, and Bombora to identify, track, and engage with website visitors actively looking to make a purchase.
Greenwald notes that although many tools work behind the scenes, implementing the solution on a website is as simple as adding one line of code. The system looks for signals indicating visitor readiness to make a purchase, and it can initiate contact with a potential customer through a bot, a friendly message, or a Slack notification to a salesperson, making it easier to engage with visitors or companies on the verge of a purchase.
“We start by identifying your anonymous website traffic and informing you about the companies, and sometimes even the individuals, visiting your website. In an instant, we can help you take action on that,” Greenwald explains.
They offer a free tier for individual salespeople to attract users to the solution. For sales teams looking to get involved, it costs $850 per month or approximately $10,000 per year. There is also an enterprise tier tailored for more advanced sales workflows. To date, the company boasts 100 paying customers, including notable names like New Relic, Gainsight, and Sendoso.
Given the evident privacy concerns, Greenwald assures that the company is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy and security regulations.
Aydin Senkut, leading the investment at Felicis, highlights that the team’s background, all of whom are former Google employees, was a significant draw. He notes that Warmly addresses a common issue found in their portfolio companies: lead generation.
“We also saw, having a broad portfolio, how many of our portfolio companies struggle with this issue,” Senkut remarks. “We were very supportive in nudging the team, maybe being a positive voice in terms of like, yes, we should double down on this latest iteration because it has great potential.”
Greenwald reveals that Felicis has been instrumental in introducing Warmly to some of their portfolio companies, aiding in the launch and refinement of this new product version.
Notably, the fact that the founders lacked a traditional sales background provided them with a fresh perspective on the problem. Greenwald notes, “We weren’t indoctrinated in this cold call, cold email, smile and dial all day long kind of ethos around sales, and we came in and said, ‘wait, why can’t we just automate all the stuff that nobody really wants to do?'”
