When Seattle tech vet Samir Manjure made the transition from engineer to startup CEO, one challenging aspect stood out: enterprise sales. Closing deals often dragged on for long periods of time, and the conventional products did nothing to make the job easier or more efficient.
Now the entrepreneur has built a tool to address that problem — and turned it into his second startup.
Manjure and Simon Skaria are the co-founders of Vieu, a new AI-powered business-to-business sales tool that provides buyer intelligence and execution strategies.
The Seattle-based startup emerged from stealth mode Wednesday with $2 million in fresh funding.
Manjure spent more than 17 years at Microsoft before he founded KenSci, a healthcare-focused machine learning and AI startup that helped healthcare organizations predict clinical, operational and financial risks by aggregating patient data from a variety of sources. The company was acquired by Providence Group in 2021.
Manjure said he was inspired by recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence and interviewed more than 75 interviews about closing B2B deals.
Vieu helps enterprise sales teams identify, connect and pitch to potential buyers by automating buyer discovery and due diligence. The tool finds noteworthy stakeholders within target accounts, then offers tips on the best methods to establish a connection. It also suggests ways sellers can pitch their product or service to prospects.
The startup’s AI tools are trained on both OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Bard. To train its model, Manjure said the startup indexed “every single person on the planet” that has a profile on LinkedIn. The model also pulls from about 40 other data sources.
The goal is to gather diverse information about potential buyers for more engaging conversation starters, such as mutual connections, podcast appearances, panel discussions, shared education, and more.
Vieu wants to help sales professionals avoid coming off as spam and cultivate more personalized outreach, Manjure said. It’s part of a broader goal of moving sales teams away from the “spray-and-pray” model, he said.
Generative AI tools such as chatbots are criticized for being error-prone. Manjure said Vieu’s AI attributes all information to a source, allowing users to fact-check details before reaching out to buyers.
The startup updates its data based on the nature of the source. For instance, financial filings like 10-Ks refresh a few times a year, while LinkedIn profiles update monthly. Some sources, such as news articles, refresh daily. Manjure said its AI tools tell users the recency of the data it pulls.
Vieu has about 20 customers and is being rolled out more broadly as the company emerges from stealth.
Manjure said the startup competes with other sales intelligence companies such as ZoomInfo and D&B Hoover. There are also a number of sales tech companies tapping into AI, such as Seattle startup Outreach, which revealed a GPT-powered email tool for sales workers earlier this year.
Manjure said the company aims to serve as a sort of all-in-one tool for enterprise sellers, offering intelligence, actionable insights, and team observability in a single platform.
Vieu’s launch coincides with enterprise sales teams being reduced in size due to rising interest rates and a tech market slowdown. Outreach and Seattle-based Highspot both had layoffs over the past year.
While at Microsoft, Manjure held various engineering leadership positions spanning CRM, Bing and AI.
Skaria, the company’s CTO, spent more than 16 years at Microsoft in various roles including SQL, Office 365, Azure AI, and mixed reality. Prior to that, he founded startups Office365Mon, which was acquired by ZScaler, and Albits, which was acquired by ICICI.
The seed round included participation from 20 undisclosed angel investors. Former CEO of Wikimedia Foundation and deputy CTO at Microsoft Lila Tretikov is an investor. Vieu has 15 employees between the U.S. and India.
