Investible is thrilled to announce that we have participated in Grw AI’s US$1.3m Pre-seed round, led by Precursor Ventures and with participation from numerous high-profile strategic angels, sales experts and advisors!

Led by a terrific trio—Alex McNaughten, Alistair McLeay and Daniel Ash—Grw AI’s generative AI-powered sales coach, Taylor, is able to ingest and analyse existing company sales playbooks, sales user behaviours, and target customers plus deal data to provide contextualised sales coaching.

TheInvestment team met the New Zealand-based founders in mid-2023 when they were still Beta testing the product with early customers. Since then, we were repeatedly impressed with the speed at which they execute on product development. Furthermore, they have demonstrated a strong knack for landing large customers in the United States, and other key markets.

In the below video, Alex introduces the Grw AI platform in more detail.

The under-served world of sales coaching

With SMEs and enterprises, sales coaching and support are rarely a substantial investment. Existing solutions primarily focus on sales enablement and unlocking efficiency gains within sales teams.

Given the highly tangible ROI of quality sales coaching, such as the potential to uplift a company’s annual revenue by ~7%, fast customer payback periods and rising pressures from the C-suite on bottom-of-funnel pipeline conversion, there is a big market push for B2B sales teams to hyper-analyse and improve their existing sales processes.

Additionally, it is estimated that ~80% of sales staff do not currently receive coaching that is tailored to their unique skills and needs, highlighting the gap between high and under-performing sales professionals.

With the rise of generative AI and a crowded sales enablement SaaS market, CROs are increasingly looking for solutions which not only uncover efficiency gains for their teams (e.g. identifying workflow problems) but also provide tangible recommendations to ultimately close deals and uplift revenue.

To capitalise on these favourable market tailwinds, Grw AI has built a self-intuitive and user-friendly (e.g. voice-to-text) sales coaching platform, powered by generative AI, for non-technical sales teams. Grw AI has focused on building a ‘data moat’ by recruiting reputable sales coaching thought leaders, and embedding their sales coaching IP into the platform to train their large language models.

Additionally, the company has been slowly collecting anonymous user data (e.g. sales user behaviours and traits) across its customer base to further refine and train itsAI models across various use cases and industries. The platform is also integrated with existing customer CRMs such as Salesforce and HubSpot, and is able to contextualise its coaching insights based on existing company sales playbooks.

Early US traction with positive customer sentiment

Since launching in January 2024, Grw AI currently has over 20 paying customers, predominantly in the US, including the likes of larger technology companies including IDEXX, TradeWindow and Relab.

Customer and user testimonials during our due diligence reference calls have also been positive, noting the ability to make better and faster decisions, self-intuitiveUI and significant sales capability uplift (e.g. improvement in win-rates and practical deal coaching to successfully navigate client negotiations). To date, the company has had zero customer churn.

Based on data provided by Grw AI, customer sales teams have also improved their performance by using the platform:

• ‍Sales execution: +27% increase in win rates‍
• Team performance: +32% increase in quota attainment‍
• Seller efficiency: +4 hours saved weekly per user‍
• Talent utilisation: +39% improvement in staff retention

Founders with complimentary B2B sales and AI/ML backgrounds and skillsets

The three co-founders collectively have experience across B2B sales coaching, AI / machine learning and data science, which fit the skillsets required to build an AI-powered sales coaching solution.

Alex McNaughten (Co-CEO) has 12+ years of B2B sales and go-to-market experience, particularly as the ex-founder of NZ-based sales training and staffing firm Apprento, and Sales Leaders, a revenue acceleration agency).

Alistair McLeay (Co-CEO) completed a Masters inMachine Learning & Machine Intelligence from University of Cambridge and wasa former Technical Product Manager at Xero.

Daniel Ash (CTO) was the former CTO of Latext AI (ChatGPT for technical researchers) with a background in full-stack engineering and data science.

The co-founders have also managed to recruit reputable Advisory Board members and strategic angels to assist with go-to-market and building out their sales coaching IP (which is ingested and embedded within the platform to train theirAI models).

We are excited to be backing Alex, Alistair and Daniel as they look to scale their impact in the US (as they will be soon relocating there!) and become the global leader in AI-powered sales coaching for B2B sales teams.

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