Traditional outbound sales approaches are losing their effectiveness in today’s competitive landscape. However, Bluebirds, a startup founded by former LinkedIn leaders, is revolutionizing the field with the power of AI. Recently, the company secured $5 million in seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, enabling them to further enhance their AI-driven platform.
Bluebirds, established in 2022, differentiates itself by utilizing AI to discover unique triggers that provide valuable insights to go-to-market teams. These insights help teams target prospects with the most relevant and tailored messages at the optimal time, on a larger scale. With the newly secured funding, Bluebirds plans to expand its team with expert data and AI engineers. Additionally, the company aims to introduce more triggers on its platform, providing a comprehensive solution that helps teams build robust pipelines and close deals more efficiently, while reducing customer acquisition costs.
The seed funding round saw participation from notable investors such as Y Combinator, 1984 Ventures, SOMA Capital, and sales tech veterans Godard Abel and Dharmesh Shah. These investors recognize the immense potential of Bluebirds and its AI-driven approach to transforming outbound sales.
The Challenges Bluebirds Aims to Solve
Sales representatives used to employ mass outreach tactics to connect with potential buyers, relying on customer profiling and sending cold emails and calls. While this approach was effective in the past, the landscape has evolved, presenting new challenges. The traditional channels of outreach have become saturated with competition, and AI-powered spam filters pose additional obstacles.
Recognizing these challenges, Kunal Punera and Rohan Punamia, who previously worked on AI products for sales and recruitment at LinkedIn, were inspired to address them. After extensive discussions with sales leaders, they saw an opportunity to leverage AI-discovered triggers within Bluebirds. These triggers include factors such as past customers who trust the solution and have recently switched jobs, compelling events from SEC filings, and intent derived from job posting descriptions.
To generate these triggers, Bluebirds analyzes vast amounts of web data using a combination of Language Models (LLMs) and classical machine learning techniques. For example, the job change trigger, currently offered by Bluebirds, allows users to upload a CSV of their existing customers or connect their Salesforce instance. Bluebirds’ sophisticated algorithms then identify the highest affinity prospects, matching them with their public profiles to detect job changes.
“If a job change is found, another algorithm classifies whether it’s a legitimate job change… Finally, the platform intelligently ranks the final leads by ideal customer profile score (created by analyzing past deals), so reps can focus on the best leads first,”
The efficiency of Bluebirds’ platform has been demonstrated by CEO of G2, Godard Abel. He utilized Bluebirds’ tool and detected 10,000 job change leads within 24 hours, driving $100k in additional pipeline the following week. Impressed by the results, over 100 companies, including OneSignal, Front, Splash, and Simon Data, have already signed up for Bluebirds to experience similar benefits.
An Affordable Solution for Revolutionary AI-Powered Sales
One of the standout features of Bluebirds’ platform is its accessibility. The base offering of the AI tool is free, allowing users to track unlimited contacts for unlimited job change leads. However, to enjoy additional features such as monthly refreshing of the job change list, human validation of leads, and Salesforce integration for distribution to go-to-market teams, customers will need to subscribe to a plan for $1000 per month.
Looking forward, Bluebirds aims to expand its team further, adding more data and AI experts. They also plan to develop new triggers that will help sales teams identify leads more effectively. Punamia acknowledges the complex but exciting nature of this AI technology and emphasizes the company’s dedication to staying at the forefront of its development.
While Bluebirds is leading the charge with its LLM-based approach to outbound sales, there are other players in the market providing reps with relevant intelligence to identify and close more deals. Some notable alternatives in the same segment include ZoomInfo (which recently acquired Chorus for $575 million), Uplead, Outreach, and Apollo.io.
