Chili Piper, a leader in inbound revenue acceleration, has announced that it has raised $18 million in Series A funding led by Base10 Partners, with participation from Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund.

According to the statement, TJ Nagahian, general partner at Base10, will join the company’s board of directors. With this new capital, Chili Piper claims that it is planning to invest in product capabilities to enable remote sales teams to work more effectively and respond to buyer behaviour instantly. In addition to this, the company is also planning to expand its sales and marketing efforts to address the $100 billion+ CRM market and serve customers worldwide.

Chili Piper was founded in 2016 by husband and wife duo, Alina and Nicolas Vandenberghe. It started by solving the frustrations of calendaring or scheduling between sales representatives and potential customers, and has since evolved into a full suite of solutions to connect inbound opportunities to sellers instantly. Chili Piper Meetings synchronises buyer and seller calendars, allowing appointments to be booked instantly with ease, keeping reps busy and buyers on track to close. It also enables buyers to be connected to available reps via voice or video instantly ensuring a continuous buyer experience and journey.

Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO and co-founder of Chili Piper, said: “Our product suite at Chili Piper is the beginning of a major evolution in how people connect with customers. Since Salesforce moved customer data to the Cloud, we are connecting cloud collaboration to sales force automation – we call this Instant Inbound.

“We are excited to partner with both Base10 and Gradient, both experts in automation and AI, to further invest in our goal to connect buyers and sellers instantly.”

TJ Nagahian, general partner at Base10 Partners, added: “While software has eaten the world, automation is the practice of putting that software into the hands of the next generation of workers. Chili Piper perfectly fits our thesis around leveraging software and cloud solutions to automate tedious tasks.

“We see the next generation of sellers demanding solutions to instantly connect them to buyers and shortening the time to close. In a more remote working world, we’re always connected and our go-to-market software solutions should take advantage of this new phenomenon.”

Customers of Chili Piper include Fortune 500 enterprises such as Intuit and Hewlett Packard and startups such as Zenefits and Monday.com. These customers leverage Chili Piper’s instant inbound solution daily across thousands of sales representatives.

Darian Shirazi, general partner at Gradient Ventures, said: “Chili Piper’s Instant Inbound solution transforms the modern seller experience, allowing reps to instantly book meetings with customers, input sales activity directly through GSuite, and focus on closing deals without switching between your CRM and inbox. We’re excited to partner with Nicolas and Alina on their journey to make the buyer’s journey instantly gratifying.”