San Francisco-based Enable.us — whose virtual salesrooms enable buyers and sellers to quickly close deals — on Thursday raised $4.5 million in seed funding.
The funding was led by investors Runa Capital, Global Founders Capital, TRAC Unicorn Fund, Pioneer Fund, Rebel Fund, The New Normal Fund (led by Allison Pickens), Dragon Capital, RingCentral Ventures, Fresco Capital, Liquid2 Ventures and Hack VC as well as prominent angels such as Jared Kopf (founder of AdRoll), Sandy Kory (managing director of Horizon Partners) and Jennifer Carolan (co-founder and general partner at Reach Capital).
Following global shutdowns in 2020, B2B sales were forced to adopt to fully digital channels to conduct business transactions. According to Gartner, by the year 2025 about 80% of all B2B sales will take place digitally. Yet transitioning from an analog process to operating within the digital space is highly involved as sales cycles can be quite long and arduous and involve numerous stakeholders and rounds of negotiations. Enable.us is trying to make it easier.
The company was co-founded by CEO Jinal Jhaveri, Adam Pearson, Galen Li and Andrey Bolaño to lessen the burden of salespeople having to learn entirely new digital skills in order to conduct B2B transactions.
They also noticed through their past experiences of scaling SaaS businesses that traditional sales software was focused on the seller side while ignoring buyer needs. They created Enable.us to empower buyers in the sales process and allow for deals to close much quicker via their digital sales rooms. By accessing a single link, salespeople are able to conduct all aspects of business — sharing product information, managing and interacting with customers, scheduling meetings and collecting analytics on sales pitches.
"We saw that deals were significantly delayed and both sellers and buyers were bogged down by dozens of emails and attachments as well as all the internal dependencies. The existing sales solutions focus on the in-person sales process. They did nothing to help sellers and buyers find the right content, collaborate and navigate the deal process. This is critical in B2B sales as the average number of stakeholders is more than ten. Focusing on the buyer’s experience ensures buyers are engaged consistently throughout the sales process, which helps sellers close more deals," said co-founder and CEO Jinal Jhaveri via email.
Not having to wait for product, engineering and marketing teams allows sellers to present all of their product information to potential buyers in one space, which speeds up the process on the buyer side. Buyers can review product demos, customer reviews, sales decks and related video content about a product within a virtual sales room without having to shuffle between email attachments and various browser tabs or programs to find more information.
“In all our previous companies we experienced the sales and buyer main pain point — long sales cycles, combined with multiple stakeholders and disparate resources being lost along the way, and this problem has been compounded by the pandemic. We knew there had to be a better way to coordinate all of these activities and empower buyers and sellers together, and that’s how we started Enable.us,” Jhaveri stated.
The platform currently contains more than 1,500 user-generated virtual sales rooms that host buyers from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
