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Working as a distributed team is not foreign to Canaan. Our Monday partner meeting attendees have long been distributed among four offices on two coasts. Our day-to-day norm is all about collaborating on Zoom and Google Drive. But we’ve always had founders come in-person to one of our offices to present to the whole partnership before issuing a term sheet. The current crisis has changed that, and BoostUp was actually the first term sheet we issued after a completely virtual partnership presentation while working from home. As venture capitalists, we invest for the long term and we believe the current macroeconomic adversity will only strengthen the long-term trend fueling BoostUp’s early growth.
We’re investing in BoostUp because it’s building a first-of-its-kind revenue intelligence platform that’s already challenging first-generation tools and has the potential to lead this growing category. Historically, every bit of sales data available to the sales leadership has either been self-reported by reps. That’s made it incredibly difficult to accurately assess deal and account status to predict revenue, so almost always, quarters have ended with a positive or a negative surprise. As teams move to more remote and hybrid settings, with more communication happening via digital channels, we believe the ability to use that data to more accurately forecast business performance and remove those surprises is critical.
BoostUp brings in a seamless and precise way to monitor and guide an entire sales team. The closest analog would be Datadog and how it monitors the application stack. BoostUp’s AI-driven platform ingests unstructured communications (from places like email, calendars, Slack and Microsoft Teams, and call recordings Zoom) and processes natural language in such a way that it can handle the nuances of human interaction. It ensures that sales leaders have the visibility they need into deals across the organization, understand sooner which deals are at risk, prioritize the deals for the quarter and properly plan and forecast. With BoostUp, sales leaders can redeploy resources on high-impact deals that need the help and create a culture of winning together.
Better still, this technology is not limited to the sales team. Many customers have already expanded their usage to marketing and customer success teams because the same amount of insight and collaboration is needed in those roles. Early customers using BoostUp have said the technology “is now a core part of our sales tech stack,” “is our forecasting state of truth,” “has allowed us to create a culture of transparency and self-regulation,” and “helps us measure consistently and accurately.” Clearly, Sharad, Amit and Neel have used their past leadership experiences at Google, Yahoo! and their own start-ups to lay a solid foundation for the company. All of them graduated from the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) and the technical rigor and product depth of BoostUp is a reflection of that pedigree.
The predictability of revenue has never been more important than it is during this global pandemic when organizations struggle to hold on to every last dollar of revenue and close every new deal. Soon, a solution like this will become table stakes for every organization. We are super excited to partner with the BoostUp team to realize this mission and vision.