French startup Zeliq secures €9.2M for its AI-powered sales boost platform: Know more

Paris-based Zeliq, an AI sales solution provider, has raised €9.2M in a seed round of funding. 

The round was led by Exor Ventures, the holding company of Italy’s Agnelli family, known for investing in French unicorns Qonto and Alan. Besides, Resonance VC, which also invested at the pre-seed stage, supported the round.

According to Zeliq, the round was heavily oversubscribed, bringing the company’s total funding to $15.4M just one year after its launch.

Making sales easy

Zeliq addresses the inefficient sales management process for B2B tech companies by hosting the entire sales toolstack on a single platform. This eliminates the need for multiple tools and enables highly targeted virtual sales.

The company identifies sales prospects, profiles LinkedIn users, automates sales workflows, and uses AI to analyse personalities and generate personalised outreach messages. It integrates accurate contact data from a database of over 450 million potential buyers.

The platform serves salespeople, marketers, and solo-preneurs.

Zeliq was founded by Dorian Ciavarella, who previously founded influencer platform Hivency and led it to an eight-figure exit to SaaS provider Skeepers, and former Hivency CFO Guillaume Cruz.

Ciavarella, also an experienced angel investor, created Zeliq after recognising the difficulties many companies face in managing their sales leads.

Ciavarella says, “We’re on a mission to make sales easy. Most businesses are hindered by the inefficiencies and costs associated with using multiple sales tools for prospecting, outreach, team management and closing a deal. This makes managing the sales cycle needlessly complicated and often overwhelming and reduces the time sales reps can spend on actually selling.”

“Zeliq solves this problem with an all-in-one solution that consolidates these functions into a single platform. We’ve mapped out the most efficient way for business developers to work, giving teams the automation they need to close deals faster.”

One of “Europe’s fastest-growing startups”

Today, Zeliq officially launched its platform after the beta version, hosted on Product Hunt in November 2023, and gained “significant” traction.

The platform has facilitated over 1 million actions on-site per month, making it one of Europe’s fastest-growing startups.

Zeliq offers features such as automatic data enrichment, sales sequences combining LinkedIn outreach with follow-up emails, a LinkedIn plug-in, and an automated email function to ensure reminders and follow-ups are never missed. 

While primarily catering to sales reps, Zeliq serves all revenue-related roles.

In under a year, Zeliq has reached over 2,000 users, including major tech companies, without any marketing. Currently, 50 per cent of its customers are in France, 25 per cent in the US, and 25 per cent worldwide.

The company now aims to expand in the US, using new funds for marketing, product development, and growing its 35-member team.

Capital utilisation

Zeliq’s co-founder and CEO, Ciavarella, says, “Our ability to secure funding so quickly reflects the confidence investors have in our vision and execution. We’re proud to have raised more money in our seed round and at a much faster pace than our competitors.”

“In fact, we completed our first fundraising in just one month, and our second round followed a similar timeline, all without a traditional roadshow.”

“Exor and Resonance bring a wealth and diversity of experience that will help us expand our product capabilities, scale in the US and beyond, and continue on our growth trajectory,” adds Ciavarella.

Brief about Exor Ventures

Exor is a holding company that blends “entrepreneurial spirit and financial discipline”. The firm’s mission is to build great companies, offer growth opportunities to their employees, contribute positively to society, and deliver “superior” returns to investors. 

Exor claims to have a history of investing in French tech companies that have achieved unicorn status, such as Qonto and Alan.

Speaking about the investment in Zeliq, Noam Ohana and Michael Lavner from Exor Ventures, mentioned, “Over the last few years we have seen go-to-market bloat shoot up as a result of an overly complex sales stack and an explosion of sales tools available.”

“At Exor Ventures we are convinced that a new wave of AI-enabled solutions – favouring a “sales-in-a-box” approach – is the only way to solve what remains today one of the biggest challenges for companies.”

“We were vastly impressed by Dorian and Guillaume’s drive and fresh take on the market: bringing all sales data and tools under one solution, simplifying the tech stack and augmenting sales and marketing staff in ways unseen to date.”