SalesLoft acquires AI-powered sales co-pilot startup, Costello

Today, SalesLoft, a sales engagement platform, is acquiring Costello, an AI-enabled sales co-pilot. The acquisition, SalesLoft’s second ever and coming shortly after it raised a $70M Series D in April, is part of the company’s strategy to provide solutions that benefit the full sales cycle – not just sales and business development reps. The acquisition will further demonstrate that commitment — especially when it comes to AI.

The acquisition comes on the heels of a year of explosive growth and recognition for SalesLoft. In addition to growing recurring revenue by more than 1000% over the last three years, the company expanded its team to more than 450 employees and opened its EMEA headquarters in London, England.

SalesLoft believes that AI’s current role in sales engagement is freeing up their human capital to focus on what really matters – the human aspect that is so important to sales. Costello is a provider of opportunity management software with quick deal updates, guided selling playbooks, pipeline collaboration, and real-time sync to CRM. The acquisition furthers SalesLoft’s mission to help account executives not only prospect and build pipeline, but manage their day and their deals, from creation through close.

SalesLoft’s Sales Engagement platform is a critical solution for more than 2,300 companies, helping global sales teams close more revenue and deliver better buying experiences at scale. With the acquisition of Costello, SalesLoft will better serve revenue professionals of all levels, including sales development reps, account executives, and sales leaders, with features including deal management, dashboards, guided-selling playbooks, and dynamic note taking.

“Combining Costello and SalesLoft gives all sellers, whether they’re pipeline builders, closers, or responsible for upsells and renewals, a platform to deliver the ultimate buyer experience and close more revenue. Sales engagement is now the place all reps can start and end their days,” said Kyle Porter, CEO and co-founder, SalesLoft. “We are thrilled to incorporate Costello’s capabilities for all SalesLoft customers.”

“Integrating with SalesLoft’s platform allows us to take our vision to the next level,” said Frank Dale, CEO of Costello. “This is the perfect time to combine our opportunity management capabilities with SalesLoft’s best-in-class Sales Engagement platform and expertise. Together we can deliver more value to our current and future customers.”

Costello announced an enhanced API integration with SalesLoft last year, which allows joint customers to proactively manage opportunities from within SalesLoft. The companies have many joint customers.

“We are thrilled about the SalesLoft acquisition of Costello. Our sales teams have been using the integrated solution for the last year and love that they can drive prospect and customer communication cadences, and manage opportunities from lead to close, all in one place,” said Adam Weber, VP of Enterprise Sales, Emplify. “This is a big step forward for revenue teams everywhere. We’re excited to keep partnering with SalesLoft.”

The companies will continue to support existing Costello customers, invest and enhance product capabilities, and natively integrate Costello capabilities into the SalesLoft platform.

“Sales Engagement platforms have started to make significant progress with sales organizations. When we look across our dataset of high-growth early-adopters, 69% are leveraging a Sales Engagement platform today” said Craig Rosenberg, Co-founder and Chief Analyst of TOPO. “As the sales engagement platform market looks to expand to the more widespread market of sales reps, we expect the platform’s feature set will also expand beyond traditional prospecting channels to serve all the day-to-day needs of the sales rep including enablement, planning and forecasting and productivity.”