Demodesk is a YC-backed startup that is building the first intelligent online meeting tool for inside sales and customer service teams. Today, we are delighted to announce that we have raised a $2.3M Seed Funding Round from GFC, FundersClub, Y Combinator, Kleiner Perkins, and a set of angel investors from Silicon Valley and Europe.

We founded Demodesk with the vision to enable anyone to have a great customer conversation using a new kind of web conferencing technology. What differentiates us from existing tools is our unique approach to screen sharing. Traditional tools only record a video of the presenter’s local desktop screen. We set up a 100% web-based virtual display instead, that anyone can access by just clicking a link.

By utilizing a virtual display, we can automatically load the right presentation content at the meeting start, provide real-time conversational guidance on the sales rep’s side without the customer seeing it, and have significantly more data to analyze than existing tools. For us, the content that’s being shared is not just a video. We know exactly what’s being shared at which point in time.

Demodesk is helping inside sales and customer success teams close more deals faster with a holistic online meeting solution. Inside sales - professional sales done remotely via phone calls, web conferencing, email, and other online channels rather than meeting face-to-face — is a huge and rapidly growing field. Out of 6 million professional salespeople in the U.S., inside sales jobs already account for 50% today. Even though the average U.S. company utilized 6 sales technology solutions in 2017, the web conferencing tools that are being used in inside sales today are purely functional. They hardly offer anything beyond video calling and local desktop sharing. In a time where almost all B2B companies build web-based software, it’s needlessly complicated to route screen sharing through local desktops still. And even though AI and NLP are slowly upgrading call recording, vendors are still having a hard time making sense of sales conversations at scale and tracking meaningful data.

“Only very few people are born as rainmaker. And most of them had to learn it over multiple years. On average, it takes 6 months to onboard new reps and only 50-60% constantly attain quotas. With their new approach to web conferencing, Demodesk is on a very good way towards solving that problem for sales teams.”

Steli Efti, Founder & CEO of Close.com (leading CRM solution) and advisor of Demodesk

‍The platform accelerates sales teams by automatically loading slides and websites to present, providing conversational guidance along with sales playbooks, and helping handle sales objections on the spot - all available from within the cloud-based conferencing tool. On top of providing real-time sales coaching, the software includes automated scheduling, deep CRM integration, and in-depth meeting analytics. Another game-changing feature, especially for customer service professionals, is the ability to instantly share mouse and keyboard control and collaboratively work on the virtual display for interactive onboarding and support.

Today, over 100 international customers are using Demodesk for their demos, closing calls, and onboarding sessions. Most of them are fast-growing B2B SaaS companies. The results they see from using Demodesk are amongst others a significant reduction of meeting no-shows, an increase in demo conversion rates by up to 25%, and saving each user up to 1h/day by automating repetitive tasks like scheduling, meeting preparation, and CRM logging.

Demodesk was founded late 2017 by Alex Popp and Veronika Riederle. They studied at TU Munich, CDTM, Stanford University, and Columbia University of New York have helped to build various international startups and worked in top-tier management consulting. Before raising their Seed Round in Silicon Valley they bootstrapped the company out of Germany with the help of university grants including EXIST, XPRENEURS, or the LMU Entrepreneurship Center and won the German Innovation Award for their innovative screen-sharing technology. Today, the company has offices in Munich and San Francisco and counts 12 people.

The capital will be used to further build the product in close collaboration with our customers and support them in scaling and accelerating their sales and customer success teams. To serve our growing customer base and fuel product development, we’ll be expanding the team in both Munich and San Francisco and are looking for ambitious developers, sales, and marketing managers to join the company.

We’re humbled to work with incredible colleagues, customers, partners, and investors. Besides Y Combinator, GFC, FundersClub and Kleiner Perkins, angels include Immad Akhund, Jude Gomila, Brad Flora, Hanno Renner (CEO of Personio) and Philipp Rösch-Schlanderer (CEO of eGym).