Exclusive: AI startup Attention just raised $14 million to bring its natural language processing tech to sales calls

Attention co-founders Anis Bennaceur (left, CEO) and Matthias Wickenburg (right, CTO) 

New York-based AI startup Attention, which uses natural language processing to fill out customer relationship management (CRM) programs and generate action items from sales calls, just raised a fresh round of funding.

The startup told B-17 that it had secured a $14 million Series A funding round led by French VC firm Alven. Existing investors Eniac, Frst, and Liquid2 Ventures also participated in the funding round, along with 645 Ventures and Aglae.

The funds follow a $3.1 million seed round the startup raised when it launched in January 2023.

When Attention founders Anis Bennaceur and Matthias Wickenburg first met, they were building competing startups. At the time, Bennaceur was building Mixer, a career platform for creative professionals, and Wickenburg was working on competitor Swipecast. But they bonded over a shared pain point: sales calls.

Sales calls were a nuisance because “it was hard to know what was happening,” Bennaceur told B-17, adding that “there was nothing to record calls or transcribe the conversation, so it was hard to get volume out of these conversations.”

So they forged an alliance and, in 2021, launched Attention to help solve the issue.

The duo spent eight months working on the first iteration of Attention, which used AI to coach sales reps. When that version struggled to find product-market fit, they pivoted in mid-2022 to develop a program that used AI to transcribe sales calls and automatically fill out the CRM.

While Swipecast was bootstrapped during its six-year run, Bennaceur and Wickenburg knew that they wanted to go the VC route with Attention to match deeper competition in the enterprise tech space and hire enough engineering talent to build an AI program.

Attention’s AI analyzes sales team calls and generates action items such as follow-up emails and Salesforce updates. The tech can also identify customers who are a churn risk and provide scorecards.

With its new round of funding, Attention will focus on automating more business tasks with the broader vision of “putting the sales team on autopilot,” Bennaceur said.

In addition to filling out a CRM, he envisions a world where his tech prepares handover notes, mitigates churn risks, handles email correspondence and customer tickets, and analyzes the data provided by customer interactions through the sales process.

“We spent a lot of time building an engine,” he said. “We want companies to have as lean of a team as possible that generates 100x of the outputs that you used to be able to do before.”

Attention is just one of many companies in the growing business of using generative AI to improve sales and supercharge the enterprise software space.

Late-stage startup Gong, which also records sales calls, raised $250 million in Series E funding in 2021 at a $7.25 billion valuation. And 11x.ai, which is building AI sales reps, raised a $50 million Series B last month from a16z, TechCrunch reported.