San Antonio—Automated sales software maker Cliently is moving to San Antonio from South Carolina after receiving a $1 million seed funding round led by San Antonio investment firm Active Capital.
Cliently sells software to small- and medium-sized businesses that helps them interact with prospective and current clients throughout the sales process. The software can hook into a salesperson’s customer relationship management software, and lets him or her automate the process of reaching out to clients through emails, video messages, and physical postcards, among other methods. The goal is to improve the response and engagement rate by using multiple mediums and engaging clients at scale, says Cliently founder and CEO Spencer Farber. That might mean sending a gift card along with a hand-written postcard and an email with a personalized video—an automated “flow,” as the company calls it. (And, yes, a member of the Cliently team does actually write the postcard, he says.)
“It’s really about both the software doing the outreach for them, when they create automated flows, and then also about having access to reach out via the software, when they want to do a one-off action,” Farber writes in an email. “It’s really powerful to be able to set a flow, and say ‘Go.’”
Applications such as Outreach.io and Salesloft offer those types of services for larger businesses, and Farber built a similar product for smaller companies that don’t have large marketing budgets, says Active Capital founder Pat Matthews in a news release. Farber plans to use the new $1 million in funding to improve its software with more filtering systems, automated delays, and early implementations of artificial intelligence. It had previously raised $500,000 million since its founding in 2016. Altair, a Tel Aviv-based investment firm, also participated in the new funding round.
Cliently, which was founded in Myrtle Beach, SC, chose to move to San Antonio because of the connection to Active Capital and because of the growing tech scene, which means it has the tech talent Cliently needs, according to Farber. The company had five employees in South Carolina. Two are no longer with the business, while two others moved to San Antonio (including Farber) and the fifth employee stayed in South Carolina. Farber hired a new CTO after the move: Huey Ly, who was previously a senior engineer at Rackspace and one of its spinouts, Mailgun. (Mailgun was acquired by Thoma Bravo earlier this month.)
“I had a chance to visit Geekdom on my first trip to San Antonio. I didn’t realize what the city was starting to build, and it definitely opened my eyes to not only what they are already doing, but where I can see the tech going,” Farber writes. “I wanted to be a part of that.”
Active Capital raised a $21.5 million fund for investing in seed financing rounds in January and has given credence to its name since. Cliently is the firm’s fourth deal in which it took the lead role in the past month. Other investments include leading a $1.8 million round for AI bookkeeping company Back Office (based in West Palm Beach, FL); a $1.5 million round for lead-generation software maker FunnelAI (based in San Antonio); and $1.75 million in funding for Cloudsnap (based in Austin), which makes software for integrating data from enterprise applications.
