Until a year ago, Arjun Pillai held the important role of Chief Data Officer at ZoomInfo, a B2B database company. He has already founded and sold two start-ups, including Insent, which ZoomInfo bought in 2021.

"If you start a start-up, you will always have that bug," says Arjun. Soon after the launch of ChatGPT, Arjun is all set to start his own company for the third time. Having run startups or worked in sales tech for more than a decade, he was confident that generative AI would help make technology sales faster and more efficient. "I didn't want to wait. I decided to start my own company, "he says.

In August 2023, Arjun left ZoomInfo and started DocketAI, a virtual sales engineer. On Thursday, the company announced that it had raised $15 million in Series A funding, led by Mayfield and Foundation Capital.

While working at ZoomInfo, I realized that sales engineers who specialize in technology sales often have to engage in conversations that don't require their expertise. Most account executives ask them complex but frequent questions. Bringing in a sales engineer for every call is expensive, inefficient and takes a lot of time, says Arjun

So Arjun embarked on a mission to build an AI version of the Sales Engineer. DocketAI helps non-technical sellers get quick answers to technical questions and receive help with drafting requests for proposals (RFPs) and other technical documents.

"" "DocketAI is doing away with the work of sales engineers, instead freeing up their time to work on more interesting, complex and strategic enterprise deals," "says Arjun."

The startup's AI works by combining, incorporating, and indexing data from more than 100 applications used by Docket's software clients. Arjun stressed that the company does not train AI on enterprise data. Docket, like Glean and Atlassian's Rovo, serves as a search engine for structured and unstructured workplace data.

But Docket's AI is different, and it's learning from the work of the best sellers. Not only does the docket provide facts to buyers, it also learns from best sellers and has the ability to measure best practices across the company.

Arjun claims that sales organizations that use the docket increase productivity and earn rates. The company has been actively selling its product since the beginning of this year and is currently adding several new enterprise-level customers every month.

"Our smallest customer has 15 seats, our largest customers have 10,00 seats," said Arjun, adding that ZoomInfo and Demandbase are also included in that list.