Hey everyone! Today we’re announcing our $22M Series A, led by Lachy Groom with additional investment from Tola Capital and Stifel Venture Banking. This brings our total funding to $27M. It’s been an amazing journey building Nooks over the past four years. I’m writing this memo to share some highlights of what we’ve done and our vision for what’s next.

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The Highlights

See what customers say about Nooks

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Raising a terrific Series A feels like great validation, but I actually get the most satisfaction from seeing our impact on customers, building an amazing team, and shipping beautiful products.

Here are a few things that tell me we’re onto something big:

1. Enormous customer impact. Over the past year, we’ve helped thousands of reps hit quota, saved customers hundreds of thousands of hours on busywork, and powered hundreds of millions of dollars in pipeline. Customers tell us Nooks is the backbone of their outbound strategy and accounts for 70-90% of their outbound pipeline.
   
2. Insane customer love. All the time, I hear reps’ stories saying they’d quit if they didn’t have Nooks; or crediting Nooks as a key factor in their promotion; or explaining how Nooks actually makes work fun. Many managers claim they couldn’t do their jobs without Nooks. I’ve even heard “I wish I could marry Nooks” a few times!
   
3. Our world-class team. As we’ve grown the team from about 10 people last year to almost 50 today, I’ve had the pleasure to work with more talented teammates than I could’ve imagined. We’ve hired former unicorn founders, postdoc AI researchers, international math & physics olympiad winners, top-tier Nooks users, and top sales reps from our competitors. Everyone is united by our values to earn customer love, take extreme ownership, and most importantly be a good person.
   
4. Phone-first cultures are winning. It’s become clear the best outbound orgs are increasingly relying on the phone. The Bridge Group reported that phone-centric orgs averaged 40% more qualified opportunities per rep compared to email centric orgs in 2023. Nooks has helped dozens of customers transform their outbound into a phone-first culture.

Over the last year, we’ve seen 4x growth in annual recurring revenue and consistently helped customers boost sales pipeline from calls by 2-3x within a month of adopting Nooks. I’m determined to use the new funds to make an even bigger impact - expanding the product to materialize our vision for the future of sales development.

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Not Just a Dialer

Our flagship product, the AI Dialer, automates manual tasks like skipping ringing and answering machines, logging calls, and taking notes. We’re not the first to build an AI dialer, but we’re proud of how quickly we’ve become a category leader, ranking #1 in G2’s AI Dialer category based on ROI.

Our comprehensive platform separates Nooks from other dialers. Not only do we help reps efficiently call through lead lists, but we also help them build those lists, enrich them, and convert those conversations. These key components of the Nooks platform include:

• Nooks AI Researcher analyzes data from emails, calls, closed lost notes, marketing campaigns, and LinkedIn to help reps personalize their call scripts and identify high-intent leads.
• Nooks Numbers leverages AI to automatically identify prospects with inaccurate phone data and finds new phone numbers using waterfall enrichment across data providers like Apollo, Cognism, and ZoomInfo.
• Nooks Call Analytics transcribes and analyzes calls to help teams answer questions like “what objections are we getting stuck on”, and “which call scripts are working best.”
• The Virtual Salesfloor provides a Zoom-like environment that helps remote, hybrid, and distributed sales teams do live call-coaching and collaborate throughout the day.
• We also recently released an AI Training feature that helps reps practice selling to a realistic AI buyer persona. This is available to try for free!

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The Future of Sales Development

SDRs today spend 90% of their time on manual tasks - like doing research, writing emails, and identifying leads. But now that AI can read, write, and even browse the web, the role must evolve.

Imagine a world where all the manual parts of an SDR’s day-to-day are automated. No more building lists, researching accounts, analyzing LinkedIn profiles, writing emails, finding phone numbers, leaving voicemails, logging calls, struggling with data quality, etc.

I believe we’ll see the role of the “Super SDR” who can do the work of 10 SDRs today. This new role will involve two things:

1. Creating AI campaigns - creative playbooks have always been necessary to cut through the noise. This will require increasingly complex AI automation tools and rich data sources.
2. Live prospect interactions - people don’t want to buy from robots. Having more time in the day will let the best reps build relationships, problem-solve, and create exceptional prospect experiences.

The responsibility of the SDR - building pipeline - is critical and it will remain. But the role will look very different, whether it’s a “Super SDR” or AEs self-sourcing.

We can place bets on the future, but one thing is for certain - the best sales reps of tomorrow will use AI tools like Nooks to cut out the busywork and focus on selling. At Nooks we assess our sales reps for AI competency, because we know the future is coming. Maybe it’s already here.

Who Should Use Nooks?

Some of the world’s best sales and sales development teams from companies like Seismic, Fivetran, Abnormal Security, and Modern Health run on Nooks for prospecting & calling.

If you’re a sales or sales development leader, I have some questions for you:

• Do you have an outbound calling motion?
• Are you struggling to hit increasing pipeline numbers?
• Are you leveraging AI to improve efficiency on your team?
• Are your AEs reluctant to pick up the phone?

If you can relate to any of these, I think Nooks might be a fit and I’d love to help. Or I can connect you with a Nooks customer who’s thought through similar questions 😀

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