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Saleo, the live demo experience startup, is the latest Atlanta SaaS platform to raise a Series A round.
The team just announced the close of its $13 million Series A, led by Emergence Capital with participation from existing investor Tech Square Ventures.
San Francisco-based Emergence Capital is no stranger to the Atlanta startup scene, as the firm led Salesloft’s Series A round back in 2015. Emergence Capital has also invested in household names like Zoom, Salesforce, and Box, alongside other big software companies like G2, Veeva, Yammer (acquired by Microsoft).
Despite the generally sluggish fundraising landscape in 2023, Saleo’s co-founder Justin McDonald said that the entire process – from the start of the raise to signing term sheets – took only three weeks.
“We were very intentional in the type of process we wanted to run and the type of firms we wanted to partner with – of course our impressive growth and unique technology helped create quite a bit of buzz to attract the right partner,” McDonald told Hypepotamus.
It turns out Emergence Capital was eager to back Saleo, as the General Partner Joe Floyd had been tracking the startup’s growth after hearing about it through Kyle Porter, Salesloft’s co-founder.
“When I first reached out to [Floyd] his exact words were “I’ve been waiting for this call!”. They had been tracking our progress and had back channeled with Kyle, unbeknownst to us. We are thrilled to have them as partners,” McDonald said. “We obviously had great data points from [the Salesloft team], as to how they operate and the types of partners they are, so it was an easy choice for us.”
Scaling Saleo
We first spoke with the Saleo team back in January, when co-founder and CEO Justin McDonald had started scaling the idea after selling his previous startup to Terminus.
Following the pre-seed round from Tech Square Ventures in 2022, Saleo has been busy reshaping the online sales demo process. Instead of the traditional experience, which is generic and clunky, Saleo allows pre-sales teams and account executives to provide real-time, data-complete demos.
Saleo says their platform drastically reduces demo prep time while increasing pre-sales NPS and boosting deal win rates by an average of 74%.
This year, McDonald told Hypepotamus that the team has grown by 3x and is now 28 people globally. On the platform side, Saleo has spent this last year investing into its AI modeling engine, something that accelerates the “time to value” during the onboarding process, and have added new features that impact “usability and enterprise scalability,” added McDonald.
Its user base has also grown, with Saleo adding impressive logos like Workday, HubSpot, Zuora, and Sailpoint as customers.