Smaller firms are only as desirous to use AI tech to supercharge their sales processes as their larger competitors. Nonetheless, they often lack the in-house IT expertise or the capital to implement enterprise-level tools, like OpenAI or Anthropic.

Darwin AI, a Brazil-based AI startup, is developing a conversational AI assistant for small businesses across Latin America that need to get into AI but don’t have an IT staff. The assistant is designed to interact with customers in a more human-like manner to assist generate more revenue. Should the conversation escalate, either negatively or grow to be a sales lead, it should usher in a human to proceed the conversation.

That is the second company for Lautaro Schiaffino and Ezequiel Sculli, who previously co-founded Sirena.app, a shared inbox tool for WhatsApp for midmarket firms. They grew the corporate to an annual recurring revenue of $15 million and presence in 25 countries before selling to Zenvia in 2020.

Schiaffino and Sculli left Zenvia in 2022 and commenced talking about what they were going to do next. They knew they desired to help the identical market and to take complex technology and simplify it for those without the technical team or time and skill to develop something on their very own.

Darwin AI co-founders Ezequiel Sculli and Lautaro Schiaffino. Image Credits: Darwin AI

“AI is a fantastic opportunity, but difficult to implement for small businesses,” Schiaffino told TechCrunch. “We saw the evolution of the midmarket, as business-to-consumer in Latin America realized there are a number of leads, however the conversion rate is low. People must consult with 100 or 200 results in sell one product.”

So Schiaffino and Sculli began developing Darwin AI’s system that connects with an organization’s customer relationship management tool and evaluates possible sales leads and escalates those, almost certainly to purchase, to a human salesperson. Using AI, Darwin takes into consideration the needs of firms after which filters leads and customers. Schiaffino described it as a two-sided system that “talks” to employees and customers to advance a very powerful leads.

As more firms implement automation into their processes, the conversational AI market is predicted to grow over 20% annually through 2030. That’s attracted a lot of startups wanting to unravel this for enterprise, most recently Rasa, Kore.ai, DXwand and OpenDialog.

Meanwhile, the corporate continues to configure the AI by onboarding more users. Darwin can be near implementing a self-learning AI function that may get an organization up and running in a matter of days without the necessity for a special IT team.

Since launching in 2023, Darwin has processed hundreds of conversations and has customers in such countries as Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. The corporate is on target to succeed in over 1 million conversations this 12 months. It also has an integration with Zapier and may connect with regional CRMs.

The corporate has brought in revenue because the starting. Actually, the founders realized that they had a success when customers were paying before there was even a user interface, Schiaffino said, though he declined to say how much revenue Darwin is generating. Darwin has a setup fee and a monthly fixed plan and in addition charges a usage fee per conversation. Additional plan tiers are coming this 12 months.

Darwin has raised $2.5 million total, including pre-seed and a seed round. Canary led essentially the most recent round of $2.1 million and was joined by H20 Capital Innovation, Dalus Capital, FJ Labs, and Latitude Capital.

“The cash funds can be for product development, go-to-market and in addition the operations teams to ensure the standard of the product,” Schiaffino said.