SaaS tech startup Chili Piper raises $18M to connect remote sales teams to customers instantly

Coronavirus pandemic has forced millions of people worldwide to work from home. The pandemic impact is most felt among businesses. With displaced sales teams, there is an increasing need to connect remote sales teams to customers instantly. Enter Chili Piper, a San Francisco-based tech startup that helps qualified leads automatically book a meeting or start a phone call right after they fill out a form on their website.

We first wrote about Chili Piper back in April 2019 after the enterprise startup bootstrapped past $2 million annual recurring revenue and raised $3 million seed round led by Flashpoint Venture Capital. The startup has experienced accelerated growth driven by increasing customers’ demand for its software. Its customers include Fortune 500 enterprises such as Intuit and Hewlett Packard and startups such as Zenefits and Monday.com. These customers leverage Chili Piper’s instant inbound solution daily across thousands of sales representatives.

Today, Chili Piper announced it has raised $18 Million in Series A funding to invest in product capabilities to enable remote sales teams to work more effectively and respond to buyer behavior instantly. The round was led by Base10 Partners with participation from Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. In conjunction with the funding, Chili Piper also announced that TJ Nagahian, General Partner at Base10, will join its Board of Directors.

Founded in 2016 by a husband and wife duo, Alina and Nicolas Vandenberghe, Chili Piper started solving the frustrations of calendaring or scheduling between sales representatives and potential customers and has evolved into a full suite of solutions to connect inbound opportunities to sellers instantly.

Chili Piper’s mission is to reinvent the system of action of sales professionals to provide them with new levels of productivity. Chili Piper is reinventing buyer engagement by enabling companies to book or connect prospects in real-time from web forms.

“Our product suite at Chili Piper is the beginning of a major evolution in how people connect with customers. Since Salesforce moved customer data to the Cloud, we are connecting cloud collaboration to sales force automation–we call this Instant Inbound,” said Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO, and co-founder of Chili Piper. “We are excited to partner with both Base10 and Gradient, both experts in automation and AI, to further invest in our goal to connect buyers and sellers instantly.”

Chili Piper Meetings synchronizes buyer and seller calendars allowing appointments to be booked instantly with ease — keeping reps busy and buyers on track to close. It also enables buyers to be connected to available reps via voice or video instantly ensuring a continuous buyer experience and journey.

“While the software has eaten the world, automation is the practice of putting that software into the hands of the next generation of workers. Chili Piper perfectly fits our thesis around leveraging software and cloud solutions to automate tedious tasks,” said TJ Nagahian, General Partner at Base10 Partners. “We see the next generation of sellers demanding solutions to instantly connect them to buyers and shorten the time to close. In a more remote working world, we’re always connected and our go-to-market software solutions should take advantage of this new phenomenon.”

Chili Piper said it also plans to use the funding proceeds to expand its sales and marketing efforts to address the $100B+ CRM market and serve customers worldwide.

“Salesforce.com has failed to meet the needs of the modern seller. Inputting data into Salesforce is difficult, tedious, and feels archaic,” said Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures. “Chili Piper’s Instant Inbound solution transforms the modern seller experience allowing reps to instantly book meetings with customers, input sales activity directly through GSuite, and focus on closing deals without switching between your CRM and inbox. We’re excited to partner with Nicolas and Alina on their journey to make the buyer’s journey instantly gratifying.”