People.ai Inc., a sales automation startup that counts a Who’s Who of tech companies among its customers, has raised a $60 million funding round led by Iconiq Capital.

The investment was announced today, just seven months after People.ai’s last raise. Several of the investors that contributed to its previous rounds joined Iconiq Capital to back this latest capital injection. The group included big names such as Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital and startup accelerator Y Combinator.

People.ai sells a cloud-based platform for organizing the vast amounts of data salespeople generate as part of their day-to-day work. The platform can automatically add a representative’s contacts, prospect interactions and related records to their company’s customer relationship management system. It then mines the data for insights that may prove useful in the deal-making process.

One of People.ai’s main focus areas is salesperson productivity. The platform analyzes the work patterns of top-performing representatives to identify what they’re doing differently from their peers, information it makes available to teams in the form of recommendations.

People.ai can also help with individual customer interactions. The platform’s algorithms scan salespeople’ correspondence with prospects to measure buying intent, detect competitor mentions and alert representatives if they’re not using the most up-to-date product messaging. People.ai also allows companies to import data to external analytics tools for further processing.

The startup will use some of the new funding to accelerate its product development plans. People.ai was already pursuing an aggressive engineering roadmap before the round: In conjunction with the funding announcement today, the startup introduced a new product called The Wire. It’s a virtual assistant that suggests next steps for salespeople during negotiations, such as if they should follow up with a key contact.

People.ai saw revenues grow fivefold in 2018 thanks to growing enterprise demand for its platform. The startup’s customers include VMware Inc. Lyft Inc., Dropbox Inc., Splunk Inc. and a long list of other companies from the tech industry.

On top of investing in product development, People.ai will seek out new partnerships in a bid to expand its ecosystem. The startup is looking to team up with systems integrators and consultants that can help get its platform into more large enterprises.

People.ai has raised $97 million to date. It’s now reportedly worth about $500 million.

Photo: People.ai