Announcing our seed

What is rift?

rift is a sales platform focusing on automating repetitive and tedious sales work. 

The story

We met at Pulley - a cap table management platform, where we ran sales and growth from pre-revenue to series B. While building our go-to-market motion, we saw first-hand how complex B2B sales really is.

Our sales team had to spend a significant amount of time on activities not directly related to selling. This included operational work like scraping, manual data entry and figuring out how deliverability works. Context-switching between all the tools in our stack made the problem even worse.

We initially thought that it was an issue with how our tooling was set up, but it turned out to be a widespread problem in B2B sales. This is backed up by research as well. A recent survey by Salesforce found that, on average, sales reps only spend 28% of their time selling.

Based on our experience at Pulley, we decided to start rift to fix that problem for more companies. A year and a half ago, Yin Wu, the CEO at Pulley, wrote the very first check and we founded rift.

Today, we are excited to announce our $5M seed round, led by Stephanie Zhan at Sequoia Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and Soma Capital, and a set of fantastic angel investors to help sales teams focus on what they do best - selling. 

Why now?

With the advent of LLMs, more and more of what sales people have to waste their time on can be automated in ways that weren’t previously possible. 

For example, prospect data is often scraped from the internet and can include typos and unnecessary text. rift can automatically correct such mistakes, requiring no work for the sales rep. The current alternative? Either spend time cleaning up your CSVs or your CRM manually, or live with your emails saying "Hi JosÂ,".

At rift, we believe that AI should take care of the tedious work so that salespeople can focus on doing their best creative work. For sales teams, this means less time spent in CSVs and more time spent on engaging with prospects. 

What rift has done so far

Since the beginning, we’ve focused on solving operational pains in customers’ go-to-market motions. We decided to start with deliverability, which has become increasingly operationally challenging with recent Google and Outlook spam filter updates. rift helps customers stay compliant with spam filters and removes the operational complexity. On average, our customers have bounce rates of 0.9%, significantly below industry average for sales emails.

We’ve since built an email sequencing tool, a cold calling product, and a meeting scheduling product. Combining all these products into a single platform allows us to reduce the amount of operational work across the outbound motion. 

More recently, we’ve been working on automating some of the core flows of SDRs, including fully automating sequence generation, and surfacing intent data to let sales teams know which prospects to focus on first. For example, rift can flag if a prospect is unusually engaged directly within the sales rep’s workflow. The sales rep can then one-click call the prospect directly from the platform to qualify them while they’re still engaged. 

rift works with customers across industries like insurance, HR, finance and tech with earlier stage customers like FlintK12 all the way to billion-dollar companies like Gusto.

What’s next

We’re still early on in our journey, and right now, we primarily help our customers with outbound sales. With the new financing, we want to double down on making outbound sales seamless. In the future, we’re hoping to expand with more products to cover the full sales process. 

If you’d like to help your sales team spend more time on calls with prospects instead of all the other tedious stuff, please find some time to chat with us here.

- Fil and Eddie