Years ago, Will Allred and William Ballance were developing a tech platform, Sorter, to use personality and communication psychology to marketing campaigns. Just as Sorter was heading to market, the pandemic hit — and marketing budgets froze. With per week of funding left, Allred and Ballance pivoted, repackaging their tech to work in Gmail in what they thought can be a transient detour to Sorter’s launch.

But users liked the repackaged product — and so did investors. So Sorter became Lavender, an AI-powered sales email coaching platform.

Lavender integrates with email providers to serve up context on a sales prospect and suggest ways to optimize the message to get a reply. Showing that there’s money in the thought, the corporate today announced that it raised $13.2 million across a Series A round led Norwest Enterprise Partners with participation from Signia Enterprise Partners and a seed round led by Signia with contributions from CapitalX, Position Ventures and various angel investors.

“By combining deep learning on email data with communication and behavioral psychology, Lavender’s AI writing assistant identifies and implements ways to extend reply rates,” Ballance told TechCrunch in an email interview. “In today’s climate, teams must do more with less. While sales team sizes shrink because of layoffs, teams use Lavender to make each rep simpler and efficient.”

Lavender’s product is made up of three different components: a sales email coach, a “personalization assistant” and an email intelligence and training portal. The e-mail tools provide research material (e.g. news and updates, funding stats, job listings, events, tweets and more) on recipients and may robotically create drafts from that research (à la ChatGPT), or just generate a couple of bullet points to work inside a preexisting email thread. As an email’s written, Lavender scores it in real time, suggesting improvements in specific areas.

“Writing a ‘higher email’ is a four-step process — research, create, edit and learn — and our product helps across all 4,” Ballance said. “As a substitute of automating, we help users write effective personalized emails faster. The AI works alongside them, but doesn’t replace them.”

Lavender’s aforementioned learning portal, meanwhile, aggregates and analyzes email activity, highlighting areas in need of improvement. Managers using Lavender can see which email templates are working versus which aren’t for example, in addition to metrics like individual email scores, open rates, reply rates and writing time.

Lavender also detects “at-risk” reps that will need additional support or coaching to fulfill certain goals. That’s not a feature prone to thrill every rep, particularly those that value their very own processes and privacy. But Ballance makes the case that it’s a net good where a corporation’s sales are at stake.

“Sales teams have turn into too focused on optimizing for efficiency and automation. This forced optimization has left buyers with a foul impression of sellers, because they feel as in the event that they’re only a number,” he said. “Sales needs to return to constructing real relationships — not automation and spam. Lavender makes real personalized emails faster for our users.”

While Lavender isn’t the one firm applying automation to the marketing and sales outreach segment, it’s definitely benefiting from the final boom time. In accordance with a 2022 report from Ascend2 and Research Partners, 69% of marketers say that their overall customer journey is partially or mostly automated while 9% say that theirs is fully automated. The identical report found that just about a 3rd — 31% — of selling professionals planned to buy a marketing automation solution in the subsequent 12 months.

Lavender’s rivals include Sellscale, which similarly uses generative AI to jot down marketing emails, and marketing automation startup Klaviyo, which received a big investment from Shopify last August. (Ballance sees Jasper and Regie as competitors, too; each leverage text-generating AI for marketing copy drafting.) Lavender has a decent customer base, though, totaling around 11,000 sellers at organizations including Twilio, Segment, Sendoso, Sharebite and Clari.

“We built for nearly two more years before raising enterprise capital,” Ballance said, declining to reply a matter about recurring revenue. “Lavender is well-capitalized to proceed constructing in the present market.

Lavender’s team recently grew to 16 employees, up from six in Q4 2022. Ballance says that the startup — which has raised $14.2 million in total thus far — will proceed to expand and fill “key roles” throughout the remaining of the yr.