Meet Rox, the $1.3 billion AI sales startup betting it can take on Salesforce

Résumé détaillé

Exclusive: The company has raised $100 million in Series B funding at a $1.3 billion valuation.

Morgan Chittum here. For decades, enterprise software giants like Salesforce have powered the workflows that keep the world’s biggest businesses running. Rox cofounder Ishan Mukherjee is betting on a future that no longer needs them.

The AI sales startup has raised $100 million in Series B funding at a $1.3 billion valuation, Rox exclusively told Fortune. General Catalyst and March Capital co-led the round, with Sequoia and GV returning and Prosperity7 joining as a new investor.

The pitch: Customer relationship management software shouldn’t just store information. It should put it to work. With Rox, AI agents research customer accounts, recommend who to prioritize, and prepare outreach for clients. Basically, it gives salespeople less administrative work and more time with clients.

Mukherjee’s conviction comes from experience. Before Rox, he started Pixie Labs, which New Relic acquired for roughly $150 million in 2020, and became New Relic’s chief growth officer.

“While running a public company through COVID, I deeply understood that every business relies on Salesforce specifically and their CRM to run their business. That was not the futureproof approach as AI was about to hit scale,” Mukherjee said.

“There are going to be autonomous agents that do customer-facing commercial work across large parts of the economy, not just tech companies,” he added. “And do we think Salesforce is the right partner to help CEOs in the C-suite to actually transform their businesses? I came out of an experience where it was not true.”

He also saw an opening as massive companies like Nvidia and Intel moved customer data out of Salesforce and into their own environments. “What that means is the world’s largest in-app application company, which is Salesforce, was becoming less of a moat, less entrenched,” Mukherjee added.

But how do they plan to take on Salesforce, a company with a $172 billion market cap? Mukherjee pointed to the founding team’s experience developing cutting edge tech.

That…

Début de l'article, extrait de Fortune. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.