Saleswhale, a Singapore-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to let companies automate their sales emails, has raised a $1.2 million seed round.
The capital was provided by VC firms Monk’s Hill Ventures, Gree Ventures and Wavemaker Partners with a number of angel investors. Those include early Dropbox hire Albert Ni, Pieter Walraven (who founded now Google-owned Pie), Juha Paananen (who sold Nonstop Games to King.com), Royston Tay (who sold Zopim to Zendesk) and Bowei Lee, CEO of LCY Chemical Corp.
We first wrote about Saleswhale last August while it was in the Y Combinator program in the U.S., and since then the team has returned to Singapore and developed the business. Its product, called Engage, allows companies to set up virtual email accounts which send communicate with sales prospects the same way a human employee would.
It isn’t a full on sales team replacement at this point, rather it is focused on handling inbound leads or reigniting stale prospects. The AIs can use charts, figures and PDFs and when a lead becomes warm again they can hand it over to a designated employee to take things further.
Engage is available for a base rate fee, after which…