Sales engagement platform Outplay raises $7.3 mn Series

Multi-channel sales engagement platform Outplay on Wednesday said it has raised $7.3 million (Rs 54.4 crore) as part of its Series A funding round from Sequoia Capital India. 

The startup, which was a part of Sequoia's accelerator programme Surge, will use the fresh capital to invest in technology and hire across the globe, Outplay said in a statement. 

Outplay, which was launched in 2019, provides a platform to help outbound sales teams plan, execute, track, measure and optimise interactions between companies and their prospects across multiple channels.  

It also claims that its customers have been able to qualify prospects faster and grow their pipeline by 300% using its tool. 

Laxman Papineni, CEO of Outplay, said that the sales engagement space is poised to be a $5.59 billion market by 2023. 

Prior to this funding, Outplay had raised $2 million from Surge earlier this year. Since then, it has grown 4x in revenue and has customers in more than 50 countries. 

Harshjit Sethi, principal, Sequoia India, noted that sales representatives spend an average of four hours per day on Outplay, demonstrating the effectiveness of the product. 

"Additionally, rapid digitization due to Covid has been a significant accelerant for the business and we believe these tailwinds will continue as outbound sales becomes more digital," he added. 

Sequoia Capital had invested in more than 130 startups in India including unicorns such as Ola, MuSigma and Zomato, though it was not an early investor in any of them.  

Last year, Sequoia received commitments worth $1.35 billion (about Rs 10,030 crore) across a venture fund and a growth fund.  

This was the largest corpus that the storied venture capital firm has raised for India and Southeast Asia. 

Sequoia Capital India struck 47 deals (both new and follow-on bets) between January and June this year, its pole position as the most active venture capital firm, according to VCCEdge. 

New startups added by Sequoia to the portfolio during the period include online beauty products marketplace Purplle, crypto platform CoinSwitch Kuber, and construction site management app Powerplay.