Seattle startup Vieu raises $11M to reimagine B2B sales outreach, with help from AI

Goodbye, cold calls. Hello, warm introductions.

That’s the promise of Vieu, a Seattle startup that wants to help companies boost their enterprise sales processes.

The company, founded in 2022 by former Microsoft leaders, announced an $11 million seed investment round on Thursday.

Sales teams are struggling to get connected to target accounts, said Vieu CEO Samir Manjure. Meanwhile, the proliferation of generative AI is making spam more ubiquitous. Cold outreach via email or phone “is just not working anymore,” he said.

Vieu crunches millions of data points to create a “business graph” that helps identify potential sales targets most likely to convert, based on a variety of signals.

“The user comes to Vieu and just enters the name of the target account they want to get connected to,” Manjure said. “Vieu automatically produces every possible connection that exists from your company to the target company.”

Vieu also provides guidance on how to sell to a potential customer based on data related to companies, events, SEC filings, and other sources.

Revenue has tripled over the past year, Manjure said. The company has about 40 customers include Hyperproof, Rubrik, HP Enterprise, and others.

“We are very much right place, right time, and right product,” Manjure said.

The company has about 40 employees with plans to double headcount over the next year.

Vieu competes against a flurry of sales intelligence startups, including Outreach, ZoomInfo, Belkins, Reply.io, and others.

Manjure said the vision for Vieu extends beyond B2B sales as it builds out business networks.

Manjure spent more than 17 years at Microsoft before he founded KenSci, which helped healthcare organizations predict risks by aggregating patient data. The company was acquired by Providence Group in 2021.

Manjure held various engineering leadership positions at Microsoft in areas including Bing and AI.

Simon Skaria, the company’s CTO, spent more than 16 years at Microsoft working on SQL, Office 365, Azure AI, and mixed reality. Prior to that, he founded Office365Mon, which was acquired by ZScaler, and Albits, which was acquired by ICICI.

Bellevue, Wash.-based firm Trilogy Equity Partners led the seed round, and Trilogy managing director Chuck Stonecipher is joining Vieu’s board.

Other backers include Incubate Fund and Vela Partners. The company announced initial funding last year.