Lusha, a Tel Aviv-based startup developing a crowdsourced data community for business-to-business salespeople, today announced it has raised $40 million. The company plans to use the funds to further grow its sales platform as it looks to invest in R&D.
According to HubSpot, over 40% of salespeople say prospecting — making outbound calls or emails in hopes of creating opportunities — is the most challenging part of the sales process. The industry is dominated by lengthy cycles, organizational buy-in, and yearly contracts costing tens of thousands of dollars. Salesforce found that today’s professionals spend just 34% of their time selling and that 57% expect to miss their annual quotas as a result.
Lusha, which was cofounded in 2016 by Assaf Eisenstein and Yoni Tserruya, provides an assistant in the form of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge extensions that live on users’ LinkedIn, Gmail, social media, and Salesforce accounts. Before Lusha, Tserruya worked as an iOS developer and Eisenstein created tech solutions for HR specialists.
Lusha’s assistant spotlights contact details like emails, phone numbers, and company info, filling out the fields for prospects when they reach lead forms and allowing users to save contacts directly to a dashboard. From the dashboard, salespeople can build lists of contacts and export them into a spreadsheet or custom relationship management platform, while admins can allocate usage credits and limit usage between team members.
“Lusha’s algorithm cross-checks data from multiple sources and over 2 billion records in real time to create the most accurate and up-to-date result for the end user,” Tserruya explained to VentureBeat via email. “To do so, we train the latest AI technology and machine-learning models based on the feedback received by our salespeople community. This ensures that users are able to find and access all the information they need about a prospect in one place, rather than having to search through numerous sites to manually compile a complete contact profile.”
Lusha also offers an API for real-time data lookup. Provided with a prospect’s name and company, the API enriches data with emails, phone numbers, location, social media info, and more.
“Lusha’s mission is to turn the challenges of salespeople into business opportunities. We do this by making business-to-business data accessible and affordable for all salespeople, no matter their company size or budget,” Tserruya said. “Salespeople only spend one-third of their time on selling due to limited access to data and the need for extensive research. Lusha’s community challenges the status quo and provides salespeople with the data that they need to reach the right person in the right organization at the right time. Even during a time of great uncertainty, with so many people working at home during COVID-19, many of our salespeople in the Lusha community are having the best sales months of their careers.”
Lusha claims to offer access to over 36 million C-level profiles, 100 million business profiles, and 15 million company profiles through its database. The company says over 520,000 sales professionals and 120,000 sales organizations — including Facebook, Zendesk, Google, Dropbox, and Uber — currently use its tools.
PSG led the series A round Lusha announced today, the company’s first public fundraising. Lusha has 120 employees.
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