Rox, a San Francisco-based startup building artificial intelligence agents to automate the work of sales teams, has raised $100 million in a funding round that values it at $1.3 billion, as investors pour money into companies seeking to reinvent business software around AI.
The Series B round was led by General Catalyst and March Capital, according to Unite.AI, which reported the funding on Wednesday, November 11. Existing investors Sequoia Capital and Factory participated, and Databricks Ventures, the investment arm of the data and AI company, and Prosperity7 Ventures, the venture arm of Saudi Aramco's investment business, joined as new investors. Reuters also reported the funding the same day.
Reports in March had said Rox had reached a valuation of about $1.2 billion in an earlier funding round, according to Yahoo Finance and other outlets.
The founders
Rox was co-founded by chief executive Ishan Mukherjee, chief technology officer Shriram Sridharan, chief growth officer Diogo Ribeiro, and Christopher Ré, a Stanford University computer science professor who serves as co-founder for research, according to Unite.AI.
Mukherjee and Sridharan are among a growing number of founders of Indian origin building AI companies in Silicon Valley, where engineers and entrepreneurs with roots in India have long played an outsized role. Ré is a MacArthur Fellow known for his research on machine learning systems and data, and has co-founded several AI companies, giving Rox a strong research pedigree alongside its commercial leadership.
What Rox does
Rox offers a single platform covering the full sales cycle, from prospecting and qualification to engagement, closing, renewal and account expansion, according to Unite.AI. It pulls data from customer relationship management records, email, calendars, Slack, call transcripts, documents and internet sources.
A knowledge graph reconciles conflicting data from these sources, and a governance layer applies a single access model across systems. The company says "its knowledge graph resolves entities and conflicting values across sources and infers relationships."
Its Outbound Agent checks contacts' current roles and email addresses using data from more than 17 enrichment providers, labels search results as matched or rejected, and can handle replies and book meetings. Teams can review every message before it is sent, pause automated activity and inspect booked meetings.
The customers
Rox's named customers include sportswear company Puma, AI chip company Groq and corporate card company Ramp, according to Unite.AI. MongoDB moved from prototype to production in 45 days, Ramp's conversion rate rose 10% to 15%, and Couchbase reached more than 90% adoption among more than 250 sales representatives, the company said.
Rox cautioned that "these performance figures reflect individual configurations and may not represent other deployments."
The company said its annual recurring revenue grew more than tenfold in its first year on the market.
Taking on Salesforce
Rox is part of a wave of AI startups challenging incumbent business software companies, most notably Salesforce, the dominant provider of customer relationship management software. Traditional CRM systems rely heavily on salespeople manually entering data and updating records, a task many find tedious. AI agents promise to automate much of this work, capturing information automatically and taking actions on behalf of sales teams.
