The diio platform, which uses artificial intelligence to assist sales teams, announced a $2.5 million seed funding round led by Base10 Partners. The funds will be used to accelerate its expansion in Latin America, where it already operates in markets such as Chile, Mexico and Colombia.
The AI-based business tools sector has grown 34% year-on-year in the region, according to Americas Market Intelligence data. However, many existing solutions face adoption problems due to their complexity and high costs. “Sixty percent of sales teams in the region still rely on spreadsheets and manual processes,” noted a recent Endeavor study.
diio was created by Paolo Colonnello, former product manager at Capitalizarme, and Nicolás Kipreos de la Fuente, co-founder of Beetrack –acquired by DispatchTrack in 2021. The platform automatically analyzes meetings, calls and messages to identify sales opportunities, churn risks and pending proposals.
“The problem was not the lack of data, but the inability to transform it into concrete actions,” Colonnello explained to Contxto. According to company figures, 70% of the information generated in commercial processes is never used to make decisions.
Currently, more than 200 companies use diio, including Buk, Xepelin and Betterfly. Some cases report significant improvements, for example Buk increased the completeness of its CRM by 95%. They also shared data on Webdox, which doubled its conversion rates in meetings.
The Latin American business software market is growing at a rate of 28% per year, driven by the digitalization of SMEs and large companies. However, only 15% of organizations in the region use tools with advanced AI capabilities, according to IDC.
Next steps and investor vision
With the new investment, diio plans to enhance its SPARK model, which uses generative AI to analyze business performance. In 2023, the platform was selected by AWS out of 4,700 global startups for its potential for impact.
“diio is changing how commercial teams work, not just adding another tool,” said Rexhi Dollaku of Base10 Partners, in a press release. The venture capital firm has invested in several Latin American tech startups, although it scaled back its operations in the region during 2022.
The challenge now will be to scale in a market where 40% of commercial software implementations fail in the first six months, according to Gartner. “The key is to maintain simplicity while adding advanced capabilities,” Kipreos concluded.
As the industry moves toward greater automation, solutions such as diio seek to close the gap between business data and concrete actions, a problem that according to consulting firms such as McKinsey costs Latin American companies up to $23 billion annually in lost opportunities.
