Nooks: Bringing AI to sales in a human-centric way

Sales pipeline is the lifeblood of a business. However, for the three million sales representatives in the United States (and millions more globally), generating sales pipeline is frequently the most manual & lowest-leverage part of their jobs. Even the largest enterprise software companies have significant parts of their global sales teams solely focused on finding new customers, and many companies pay for a massive suite of software tools in the hopes of generating more pipeline.

With the popularization of email outbounding tools, came email fatigue. Prospective customers open cold emails just ~1% of the time. As a result, sales reps have begun to focus on cold calling, which is much more time intensive than email. To cold call, sales reps must first research buyers, find relevant contact information, wait through ring tones, leave voicemails, and then they must make a flawless, personalized real-time impression to engage a prospect quickly. With the status quo of this process, many sellers report that they only spend a few hours actually selling per day, with the remainder of their time littered with mundane tasks.

Enter Nooks, which automates the tedious parts of pipeline generation using recent advancements in large language & audio models. Nooks’ early product, the AI Dialer, automates manual parts of doing sales calls. The Nooks platform has also recently grown to include multiple additional assistants across coaching and prospecting to cover many manual pipeline generation activities.

The return on investment of using Nooks is clear; 80% of customers see productivity double in the first two weeks of using Nooks, and world-class organizations like Seismic, Fivetran, Amplitude, Modern Health, and Verkada rely on Nooks to generate over 70% of their sales pipeline. In just a few years in the market, Nooks has already helped thousands of reps hit quota, saved customers hundreds of thousands of hours, and helped customers add hundreds of millions of dollars in pipeline. As a result, Nooks has grown revenue over 4x YoY. These best-in-class metrics, as well as speaking to countless customers who couldn’t go back to life without Nooks, stand out even in a notoriously competitive & challenging space.

Over the coming years, Nooks will continue to transform the jobs of millions of sales reps around the world, allowing them to focus more on human-centered, strategic work like building relationships and winning deals. We believe that sales as a whole will be one of the industries most changed by AI, and we align with Nooks’ approach of supercharging human SDRs. By starting with the phone call, the dominant outbound channel for most companies, Nooks gains valuable interaction data that will give them a strategic feedback loop for future products. Ultimately, given how much of closing deals is reliant upon complex human relationships and live meetings, we believe the vast majority of value AI can provide is in eliminating inefficiency in prospecting workflows broadly.

Nooks became a game-changer for sales reps through the Nooks team’s deep customer obsession. Founders Dan, Nikhil, and Rohan met at Stanford, and when they started Nooks in the peak of Covid, it was a virtual office. Through their unparalleled ability to listen to customers, they focused in on a virtual salesfloor, and then developed a dialer product that caught fire.

Their grit, technical abilities, product execution speed, and deep understanding of ML highly impressed our team, who has gotten to know Dan over many years, starting in 2020 when he worked with Leigh Marie at Scale AI. We’re excited to partner with Nooks, and lead their Series B.

—Leigh Marie and Mamoon