Within 28 hours, AI startup Aurasell raised $30 million in seed funding to undertake Salesforce and other legacy sales software companies.
Aurasell, who came out of stealth and announced its seed funding on Tuesday, aims to automate sales and streamline different tools. More recently, it streamlines AI agents built on top of customer relationship management (CRM) software such as Salesforce. This includes sales tools for forecasting, exploration, account population and more.
The company closed the seed round in June 2024 and began construction last August, said Auracell co-founder and CEO Jason Eubanks, who was briefly working as a venture partner in the next 47. Next47 led the funding round and also featured participation from Menlo Ventures and rare ventures.
Eubanks worked as a sales executive for companies such as Cisco Meraki and Twilio for 20 years. He co-founded Auracell with CTO Srinivas Bandi, who previously worked for software distribution company Harness.
The bloating of this tool is not only expensive, but also a productivity killer for the sales team, Eubanks said. He said while working at Harness, the company had almost 12 different tools to support its sales team, spending millions of people on software subscription fees each year.
“We have the opportunity to inject intelligence in an automated way into these processes, which are officially manual, using AI,” says Eubanks.
Eubanks said Aurasell raised its first $25 million in 12 hours, and the round was oversubscribed for $40 million before initially retreating. As Auracell investors were on the board of directors of the company he and Bundy used to work for, Eubanks said, he was drawn to the lucrative issues that Auracell was trying to solve.
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Bundy said the Aura Cell seed round is large due to the costs associated with building AI systems quickly from scratch.
In addition to the infrastructure costs, Auracell hired around 40 engineers. Half of that is AI engineers. 70% of the team is based in San Francisco, with the rest in India. Aurasell earns money by charging an annual subscription fee per user.
Aura Cell isn't the only one trying to disrupt the software it sells with AI. Boston-based Creatio, which sells CRM tools and a variety of other apps, raised $200 million at a valuation of $200 million last year, while Seattle-based Clarify announced its $15 million Series A in June.
