• by Ray Schultz , February 2, 2023

Lavender, which offers what it says is an AI-powered sales email coaching platform for salespeople, has raised $11 million in Series A funding, bringing its total financing to $13 2 million.  

This follows a $2.2 million seed-funding round that closed weeks before the Series A investment.

The Series A round was led by Norwest Venture Partners,  with participation from Signia Venture Partners.  

Signia also led the initial seed round with participation from CapitalX and Position Ventures. That round also included other angel and seed investors including Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox), Alex Lieberman (Morning Brew), Troy Osinoff (JUICE), and Braydan Young (Sendoso).

“Lavender’s platform goes beyond basic AI-generated writing to augment — rather than automate — sales outreach and humanize every interaction,” states Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “It supercharges sales reps by reducing their time spent writing emails so that they can focus on building relationships and selling products,” 

Lavender integrates natively with Gmail, Outlook, Outreach, and Salesloft, the firm says. In addition, it works with LinkedIn, Google Docs and Salesforce through its universal version: Lavender Anywhere, it adds. 

in addition, the company says Lavender offers such features as:  

• Coaching Dashboard — This provides insights on team and individual email scores, open rates, reply rates, and writing time. It also identifies “at-risk” reps that may need more support. 
• AI for Sales Emails — This “Start My Email” tool allows users to draft outgoing email messages based on a few bullet points, using generative AI. 
• Personalization Assistant — This allows users to quickly research their recipient and personalize their email. 

To date, Lavender has been used by such firms as Twilio, Sharebite, Sendoso, Segment, Lucidworks, and Clari. 

"We have spent a lot of time and resources enabling the team to efficiently send great personalized sales messages,” states Ryan Swearingen, director, sales development strategy at Twilio. “Lavender preserves that investment! It reinforces everything we want them doing." 

“The impact of Lavender has been enormous,” adds Kyle Coleman, senior vice president of marketing at Clari. “Our sellers are writing emails in half the time and getting twice as many replies — and our managers are now coaching strategically instead of on the basics.” 

Devin Schiffman, vice president of global alliances at Salesloft, says “Lavender is delivering exceptional value to our customers. Their integration provides real-time email assistance to help Salesloft customers build and deepen their relationships with prospects through better emails.”