Bluebirds Raises $5M Seed Round Led by Lightspeed to fix outbound sales

Founders Rohan Punamia (left) and Kunal Punera (right)

We're excited to announce that we've raised a $5M Seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Y Combinator, 1984 Ventures, SOMA Capital, and sales tech veterans including Godard Abel and Dharmesh Shah.

The problem with outbound

In 2021, 68% of SaaS companies said outbound sales was their most effective growth channel.¹ But we've spoken to hundreds of sales leaders and there's a clear consensus – in 2023, it's not working as well as it used to.

Outbound teams are missing their revenue targets because of channel saturation, driven by more competition and smarter spam filters. Targeting based on simple ideal customer profiles and mass outreach no longer cuts through the noise.

The result? Higher customer acquisition costs, slower deal velocity, and both CFO and CROs struggle to justify the ROI, especially for companies with mid or low contract values.

Yet top reps still hit quotas by discovering unique triggers that drive better targeting and personalization. For example, a rep selling event marketing software looks at the number of live events listed on their prospects' websites. Another tracks when admin users switch jobs to leverage them as champions in their next accounts.

Doing this well involves piecemealing data and workflow across a dozen tools. It's complicated, expensive, and difficult to scale to the entire sales team.

Our vision to make outbound ROI positive again

We see an opportunity to rethink outbound workflows with AI as the foundational engine, not a tacked on feature to legacy workflows that no longer work.

In Lightspeed's 2023 sales and GTM benchmark report, 75% of companies are using or interested in using an AI-driven solution for outbound prospecting. But their main hesitation is AI's ability to handle nuance.

AI should help discover and scale the unique triggers in a company's outbound motion, not shy away from it and serve generic use cases.

We're building Bluebirds to create, test, and scale triggers with AI. Reps can quickly target and personalize their outreach in a unified workflow - reaching the right personas, with the right message, at the right time.

Kunal and I previously built AI products for sales and recruiting at LinkedIn and RelateIQ. With this Seed capital, we've built a world class team of AI and data experts to push the envelope of our customers' outbound motion.

Track your customer job changes for free

In addition to announcing our financing, today we're launching our first feature to track customer job changes. Past customers are 4x more likely to buy vs. cold prospects because they already trust your solution.

Now, you can download a list of all your past customers who switched jobs. It's self-serve, free, and has no limits. Just upload a .CSV of contacts or connect Salesforce for automatic tracking, and get your personalized list of high-converting leads.

Export unlimited job change leads

Hundreds of sales teams have downloaded over 100,000 leads to build pipeline faster. Scale-ups like Front, Simon Data, and OneSignal use Bluebirds for monthly leads pushed directly to their CRM. If you need more pipeline, give us a try.

We're just getting started and excited for what's to come! And if you have any feedback or want to learn more, just reach out at rohan@bluebirds.ai.