Korl raises $5M to craft customized customer communications for sales teams

Customer success software startup Korl Inc. says it’s on a mission to help businesses of all sizes unlock more revenue growth opportunities after raising $5 million in seed funding to coincide with the general availability of its platform.

Today’s round was led by MaC Venture Capital and Underscore VC, and saw participation from Stage 2 Capital and Perceptive Ventures, as well as a number of angel investors, the most prominent being Diane Greene, former Chief Executive of Google Cloud and the founder of VMware Inc.

The startup is leveraging artificial intelligence to help companies better communicate the value of their products and services to customers, so they can use whatever insights it pulls up to increase sales. To do this, it has built a novel “presentation agent” that creates customized presentations for customers at critical milestones, such as executive business reviews and renewal conversations.

The agent works by crafting a presentation that addresses each customer’s top concerns, highlighting how the company’s products and services can make a difference.

In some ways, it can be thought of as a bridge between a company’s internal tools and its communication strategy, guiding the way it talks to customers. It attempts to understand the strengths of each product and the outcomes it can generate, and then matches this understanding with the needs of each customer. For instance, it will assess the customer’s business priorities, usage history and lifecycle stage, so companies can better understand how they’re able to help them.

Korl co-founders Berit Hoffmann and Sumeet Pannu said they built the company after realizing that even the most sophisticated businesses struggle to transform fragmented and inconsistent data into an effective communications strategy. This failure results in ineffective customer engagement and missed opportunities, and that is exactly what they’re trying to address.

“Collecting and translating data from siloed systems of record into the ways people communication has always been a painful, manual lift,” said Korl CEO Hoffmann. “We built Korl to reimagine this process of turning business data into clear, powerful narratives, using AI to gather context and deliver personalization well beyond our limits as humans.”

To get started, companies can connect Korl to existing data sources, such as Salesforce, Jira, Google Docs and Figma. Its data agent will then try to aggregate all of the most relevant data for each customer to try and make sense of where they are in their journeys.

Armed with that information, Korl then attempts to map each customer’s needs with each new and existing product capability, so sales and customer success teams can understand which features they need to highlight during their next call.

The background work performed by Korl is extensive. For instance, it might combine engineering documentation from Jira with customer requirements in Google Docs and product designs in Figma, helping it to build up a more comprehensive picture of each product’s capabilities and the customer’s needs. It can then intelligently match each feature with any customer who is likely to find it relevant.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Liz Miller said solutions that aggregate customer data in order to create higher fidelity customer signals are nothing new, with AI doing much to bridge the gap between intention and action when it comes to connecting the data dots.

“What’s new is that AI is closing the gap by doing what we have not been able to do quickly or easily with massive stores of data that we can now access and normalize,” Miller said. “What I find especially interesting here is that Korl also leverages generative AI to create personalized and product information-rich presentations that update themselves based on what the latest data points show about their customers.”

Korl believes it has created a powerful sales tool, and it has some traction, with early adapters such as DataCamp Inc. and Sendoso Inc. using it to create customer-specific content.

Sendoso’s chief customer officer Amir Younes said Korl solves a very common pain point, in that go-to-market teams are often unprepared to explain and sell new product features to customers. “With Korl’s AI, GTM enablement and asset creation could be just a click away, without adding overhead for R&D teams,” he said.

Image: Korl