Zeliq, a AI sales solution provider, has raised €9.2 million in seed financing. The round was led by Exor Ventures, the holding company of Italy’s Agnelli family renowned for its investments in French unicorns Qonto and Alan, and supported by Resonance VC, which also invested at pre-seed stage. The latest round was heavily oversubscribed and brings its total funds to $15.4 million just one year after launching.
The Paris-based startup tackles one of the biggest pain points faced by B2B tech companies today – the disjointed and inefficient sales management process. It hosts the entire sales toolstack in a single platform, which eliminates the need to switch from one tool to another and allows businesses to conduct highly targeted virtual sales.
Zeliq was founded by Dorian Ciavarella – the founder of influencer platform Hivency, which made an eight-figure exit to SaaS solutions provider Skeepers – alongside Hivency’s former CFO, Guillaume Cruz. Ciavarella is also a seasoned angel investor, which motivated him to create Zeliq as he realised how many companies struggled to manage their sales leads.
Zeliq’s cofounder and CEO, Dorian Ciavarella, said: “We’re on a mission to make sales easy. Most businesses are hindered by the inefficiencies and costs associated with using multiple sales tools for prospecting, outreach, team management and closing a deal. This makes managing the sales cycle needlessly complicated and often overwhelming, and reduces the time sales reps can spend on actually selling. Zeliq solves this problem with an all-in-one solution that consolidates these functions into a single platform. We’ve mapped out the most efficient way for business developers to work, giving teams the automation they need to close deals faster.”
Zeliq identifies sales prospects, profiles LinkedIn users, automates sales workflows, and uses AI to analyse personality, strategy, and generate personalised outreach messages. It integrates highly accurate contact data from a database of 450+ million potential buyers, the largest of any European sales platform. The versatility of the solution allows it to be used by not only sales people, but also marketers and solo-preneurs.
In less than a year, Zeliq has reached over 2000 users worldwide, including many of tech’s household names, without any marketing expenditure. Currently, 50 percent of Zeliq’s customers are in France, with 25 percent in the US, and the remaining 25 percent distributed worldwide. Its immediate goal is to establish itself in the US market, so funds will be put towards scaling in the US and internationally through marketing, product development and hiring into its 35-strong team.
Noam Ohana and Michael Lavner from Exor Ventures added: “Over the last few years we have seen go-to-market bloat shoot up as a result of an overly complex sales stack and an explosion of sales tools available. At Exor Ventures we are convinced that a new wave of AI-enabled solutions – favouring a “sales-in-a-box” approach – is the only way to solve what remains today one of the biggest challenges for companies. We were vastly impressed by Dorian and Guillaume’s drive and fresh take on the market: bringing all sales data and tools under one solution, simplifying the tech stack and augmenting sales and marketing staff in ways unseen to date.”
