Founded by Indian Americans Samir Manjure and Simon Skaria, Vieu provides buyer intelligence and execution strategies.
Seattle-based B2B startup Vieu announced Thursday an $11 million funding round, claiming it can make all the difference to sales teams that are finding traditional approaches impractical.
Vieu, a business to business sales tool powered by artificial intelligence, has a mission to help companies boost their enterprise sales processes by providing buyer intelligence and execution strategies.
Co-founder and CEO of Vieu, Samir Manjure told Forbes that “the legacy sales tools are going to become ancient history,” as “they’ve simply stopped working.” Manjure added that companies are shying away from strategies that involve cold outreach via calls and email. In fact, Vieu’s philosophy entails ”warm introductions” generated by “a qualified pipeline.”
Founded in 2022, the B2B sales startup has over forty customers including HP Enterprise, Rubrik, StackGen, Productiv, and Hyperproof.
In 2023, Vieu raised a thumping $2 million for its first-ever seed investment round. Just a year later, the startup has grown with its revenues tripled and customers increased, said Manjure. “We’ve definitely found ourselves in the right place at the right time,” he added.
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Competing against numerous sales intelligence startups like Outreach, Belkins, Reply.io, ZoomInfo, and more, Vieu manages to set itself apart by using AI-powered technology that increases productivity of sales by three times and helps secure first meetings with clients five times quicker, according to the company’s testimonials.
Simon Skaria, Vieu’s CTO and co-founder, has previously held various technical and leadership roles at Microsoft, similar to his founding partner, Manjure.
“Two secular trends are playing out in the market,” Skaria tells Forbes, “First, buyers are getting return-on-investment conscious on investments [in sales software]. Second, large language models have become 100 times more effective, affording us super powers to mint gold from our proprietary data sources.”
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Vieu’s latest fundraiser was led by Trilogy Equity Partners, along with Incubate Ventures and Vela Partners; over 40 angel investors, including C-suite leaders in sales roles, have invested in the company. Furthermore, Trilogy’s managing director Chuck Stonecipher is set to join Vieu’s board of directors, according to GeekWire.
Manjure, who holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, founded and served as CEO of Seattle-based data science company KenSci, which was later acquired by Providence (now Advata). Before that, he spent 17 years working in various roles at Microsoft.
Skaria, a 16-year veteran of Microsoft, led the product engineering efforts for innovative technologies such as 6DoF Head Tracking, Spatial Reconstruction, and Visual Cognitive Services, transforming them into commercially viable products like HoloLens, Azure AI services, and Windows Mixed Reality devices, according to his LinkedIn profile.