Within 28 hours, AI startup Aurasell raised $30 million in seed funding to take on Salesforce and other legacy sales software companies.
Aurasell, which is coming out of stealth and announced the seed funding on Tuesday, aims to automate sales and streamline the disparate tools — and more recently, the AI agents — built on top of customer relationship management (CRM) software like Salesforce. It includes sales tools for forecasting, prospecting, account population, and more.
The company closed its seed round in June 2024 and started building last August, said Aurasell cofounder and CEO Jason Eubanks, who briefly worked as a venture partner at Next47. Next47 led the funding round, which also featured participation from Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures.
Eubanks worked as a sales executive for 20 years at companies like Cisco Meraki and Twilio. He cofounded Aurasell with CTO Srinivas Bandi, with whom he previously worked at software delivery company Harness.
The tool bloat is not only costly but a productivity killer for sales teams, Eubanks said. He said that when he worked at Harness, the company had nearly a dozen different tools supporting sales teams and spent millions annually on software subscription fees.
“There’s an opportunity to use AI to inject intelligence in an automated way into these processes that were formally manual,” Eubanks said.
Eubanks said Aurasell raised the first $25 million in 12 hours, and the round was initially oversubscribed at $40 million before it was walked back down. Aurasell’s investors had been on the boards of companies where he and Bandi had previously worked, and they were drawn by the lucrative problem Aurasell was trying to solve, Eubanks said.
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Bandi said Aurasell’s seed round was large because of the costs associated with quickly building an AI system from the ground up.
In addition to the infrastructure costs, Aurasell hired roughly 40 engineers — half of whom are AI engineers. 70% of the team is based in San Francisco, and the rest is in India. Aurasell makes money by charging an annual subscription fee per user.
Aurasell isn’t the only company looking to disrupt sales software with AI. Boston-based Creatio, which sells CRM tools and a variety of other apps, announced it raised $200 million last year at a $1.2 billion valuation, while Seattle-based Clarify announced a $15 million Series A in June.
