Despite the slowdown in venture capital activity that the tech industry is experiencing, InsideSales.com Inc. has managed to bring an impressive lineup of backers abroad for its latest round of funding.

The fast-growing sales automation provider today announced that it has secured $50 million from nine investors led by Polaris Partners. Other notable participants include Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, U.S. Venture Partners and Microsoft Corp., which first invested in InsideSales.com as part of its previous $60 million raise in 2015. The company stated at the time that the round put its valuation “well north” of $1 billion.

InsideSales.com earned its ticket into the unicorn club thanks to a cloud-based platform that promises to help B2B salespeople be more productive. The service is based on Neuralytics, a homegrown machine learning engine that the company has spent nearly a decade perfecting. Its algorithms draw upon a database of more than 90 billion “sales interactions” collected from various sources to generate fine-grained recommendations on interacting with prospects.

InsideSales.com can plug into a company’s customer relationship management platform and quickly organize leads based on their importance. According to the firm, Neuralytics then checks each contact against its sales interaction repository to find useful patterns. The engine is capable of everything from identifying the best time to call a particular lead to estimating their chance of becoming a paying customer.

The company claims that the information provided by its platform allows salespeople to spend their time more efficiently, thus improving revenue on the long run. Team leads, meanwhile, have access to a forecasting tool that the company says makes it possible to predict sales performance up to twice as accurately as traditional alternatives.

Following today’s investment, InsideSales.com will seek to broaden the appeal of its platform even further by adding integrations between its platform and Microsoft products. The effort is set to place a particular emphasis on the company’s recently introduced Playbooks feature for automating salespeople’s workflows.

On the business front, InsideSales.com plans to use its new funds to launch an expansion into Europe. The company indicated in a press release that it has selected as Ireland the location for its future regional headquarters. No specific reason was provided for the pick, but it may have something to do with the fact that the governmental Irish Strategic Investment Fund was among the contributors to today’s round.

Photo courtesy of InsideSales.com