Seed stage venture investing is all about the founders, and we spend much of our energy trying to find and build relationships with great teams. Despite the upfront work, it’s impossible to know how the post-investment relationship will work in practice. Unless, that is, you have a strong existing relationship – which is why we’re thrilled to announce our investment in Avina as they apply their AI expertise to transform sales productivity.
Avina is our first ‘round trip’ investment as a firm, as we backed the founding team Ron Fisher, Michael Wang, and Vivek Sudarsan as first-check investors in their previous company, Bowtie.AI. We supported them as they built and deployed an AI scheduling tool for the beauty and wellness industry, got their first customers and ultimately sold Bowtie to Mindbody (who was a partner and the leading system of record in the space). Their journey from idea to product-market fit, rapid growth, and eventual acquisition by Mindbody validated their capability to create, scale, and exit a tech company successfully – plus they’re exceptional teammates and even better people.
With Avina, Ron, Michael, and Vivek are taking their expertise in AI to a new level, targeting a high-impact problem in B2B sales enablement. Having faced the challenges of B2B sales firsthand at BowtieAI and at a larger scale at Mindbody, they’ve developed Avina to be the AI-driven solution the industry needs.
Avina is transforming the sales productivity space by offering sales teams an intelligence tool that plugs into their existing software stack to help them close more deals. Avina integrates with the entire marketing and sales software stack—over 100 products and counting—and leverages advanced data science to consolidate internal and external data into a cohesive timeline of a prospect’s activity.
We’ve made a number of investments in the sales and marketing space, including companies such as Seamless.ai, Calibermind, Podsights (acquired by Spotify) and most recently BranchLab, to name a few. The amazing thing about sales and marketing is that the budgets are sizeable, and customer adoption can be amazing when a tool proves it can drive more revenue. The downside of the space is the perception (and sometimes reality) that the sales and marketing stack is overcrowded with point solutions and that ultimately the vast amounts of data aren’t used effectively.
The Avina team has seen these challenges and opportunities firsthand, and is building Avina today not only because the problem remains unsolved, but more importantly, because the advancement in AI in the past two years has enabled new ways to organize, clean and analyze sales and marketing data. A unique insight from the team’s previous experience is that to make a product truly transformational, it needs to integrate seamlessly into how teams actually work – and Avina’s proactive approach achieves this by building alerts and insights directly in existing platforms. This engagement-centric design makes Avina more than “just another tool” – it’s an AI-powered partner that’s deeply embedded in the daily workflow of sales teams.
We look forward to getting to spend more time with the Avina team as they make sales team’s lives easier, and we’re especially excited to be co-investing here with our friends at RRE Ventures and Y Combinator.
