Workbounce raises $2.7 million from Index Ventures to build a co-pilot for sales teams

PRESS RELEASE

• Index Ventures leads $2.7 million seed investment via its Index Origin fund
• Workbounce is a ‘Google meets Slack’ product for sales teams: a search, collaboration and analytics platform that serves as single point of entry to all the data, documents and information that salespeople need to create successful customer relationships
• With asynchronous and distributed working on the rise, Workbounce responds to the demand for tools that make communication and collaboration faster, more accurate and more ‘human’ – radically improving the quality of customer journeys
• The company was founded in 2021 by Adam Smith and Rowan Bailey, early employees at Peakon (acquired by Workday, $700M)

Workbounce – a search, collaboration and analytics platform for B2B salespeople that allows them to improve and manage relationships with customers – has raised $2.7 million in financing from Index Ventures and a group of leading angel investors. The success of Workbounce underscores the global demand for intelligent tools that can ‘humanize’ digital interactions and respond to the changing dynamics of the 21st century workplace.

Workbounce was founded in early 2021 by Rowan Bailey and Adam Smith, among the first hires at employee feedback company Peakon (acquired by Workday for $700M in March 2021) – where they built and grew revenue teams, and experienced the challenges of selling at scale first-hand. Both founders started their careers in Sales and Account Management.

Selling commercial products is increasingly complex and competitive. Sales teams succeed by understanding their clients' challenges, responding to their questions, and building trust in their product. Closing a deal with a customer typically involves six to 10 decision-makers on the client side, each of whom must be armed with multiple sources of information.

Previously, sellers would retain their ‘edge’ and build relationships with customers via regular face-to-face meetings. Located in a physical office, they could also turn to a colleague to ask for advice or the specific pieces of information a client needed. However, with the rise of remote and distributed work, salespeople are under more pressure than ever before to have the right answers and documents at their digital fingertips.

The need for a systemic fix is demonstrated by a 22x growth in investment in sales enablement tools over the past five years – from $21m in 2017 to $477m in 2021 – according to Crunchbase data. Software-as-a-service solutions have proliferated in this period too. As a result, vital information now resides in ever more silos across the organization (Slack, Google Drive, Notion and more) – which makes it increasingly time-consuming and burdensome for salespeople to find what they're looking for.

Workbounce addresses the problem by acting as a single point of entry to all the different knowledge hubs that sales teams use. The platform is an intelligent, connective layer that stitches together information silos, allowing reps to quickly surface answers to customer queries and present the material to clients in a seamless and compelling way.

“The way businesses engage with their customers one-to-one through sales and customer service teams is changing—and it’s driven both by increasing customer expectations and shifts in the way we work,” says Adam Smith, Co-Founder and CEO. “The next generation of B2B relationships will be about collaboration towards solutions, not just selling products and services.”

The culture at Workbounce reflects the fact its product is responding to the reality of the modern workplace – from its remote-first structure to its flexible work-week and ‘anti-facetime’, results-focused ethos.

"Workbounce has the potential to become the go-to tool for accessing sales knowledge and improving B2B customer relationships,” says Hannah Seal, Partner at Index Ventures. “As the workplace is changing, finding the right information at the right time is becoming more and more challenging. Workbounce solves this problem and helps sales teams engage with customers and close deals. We are excited by the size of the opportunity and impressed by the depth of Adam and Rowan's personal experience in grappling with the problem.”

“Ask any customer-facing rep what their biggest pains are and they’ll say finding the right information or documents, doing admin for customers, and understanding how engaged their clients are,” says Rowan Bailey, Co-Founder and COO of Workbounce. “We’re aiming to solve all of those challenges, so that reps can focus on giving their customers the best possible experience.”

Workbounce already has multiple paying customers and is in the pilot phase with several others. As it evolves, the team will offer more sophisticated features – including using AI-powered recommendations to inform salespeople which assets are most likely to convert leads into customers or deliver other successful outcomes. The new funding will also allow Workbounce to build out collaborative customer spaces to improve how knowledge is shared outside the vendor organization – freeing up reps to go above and beyond in other areas of relationship building.

“Ultimately, our goal is simple: To give a better experience to our customers’ customers,” says Smith. “We do this by putting knowledge directly into the hands of reps and customers, while providing insights and analytics that help revenue leaders make better strategic decisions.”

About Workbounce
Workbounce is the insightful co-pilot for customer-facing teams. We connect siloed tools—like Google Drive, Notion and Slack—with a layer of intelligent search and analytics. No more digging through multiple platforms looking for content, collateral, conversations or contracts. Instead, Sales and CX reps get the answers and insights they need to win deals and wow customers—right at their fingertips.
Founded in 2021 by Adam Smith and Rowan Bailey—two early hires at Peakon (acq. by Workday, $700M)—Workbounce is on a mission to redefine how people work together. Workbounce is a remote-first and asynchronous company, backed by Index Ventures.