Trey Allison and Ben Parker, co-founders of Kronologic with their dog, Kafka at Galvanize.
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Kronologic has created software that turns sales leads into meetings automatically.
Through automation, bots and artificial intelligence, Kronologic’s software moves the conversation to the calendar, said Trey Allison, the company’s co-founder.
“Let’s get to the yes quick or let’s get to the no quick and let’s cut through all the noise that is the inbox,” Allison said.
Allison and co-founder Ben Parker encountered the problem firsthand while working at VMWare, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies that provides cloud computing and platform virtualization software and services.
Allison and Parker met and started on the same day at VMWare. Soon after, they noticed that the company spent millions on marketing and half of the leads they generated were never touched or they would take months to follow up on, Allison said.
So, Allison and Parker built a software program that when sales leads came into the system, the software would reach out and schedule time with salespeople automatically.
“It worked, really, really well,” Parker said.
The software improved operations for the 40-person staff significantly. It doubled their revenue in six months and shrunk the team size down to 25 employees, Allison said.
“They were following up on all the leads,” Allison said. “For the first time in our history, we didn’t have a backlog of leads because we processed them all.”
That’s when they decided to found Kronologic to bring their solution to even more companies. They hired an attorney and VMWare gave them permission to start over with the project and create a new company, Parker said. That was two years ago.
Since then, they’ve built the software, made it scalable, raised an undisclosed amount of seed-stage funding and now they are entering the market aggressively. The software is integrated with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office 365, and Google’s Gmail.
Parker left his job at VMWare on Oct. 1st. Kronologic is based at Galvanize in downtown Austin. They are starting a pilot project with Thompson Reuters and they’re working to land other customers.
“We want to target the enterprise where we came from and to do that, we had to have an enterprise-grade application,” Parker said.
Kronologic’s broader vision is to automate the work calendar.
“Ultimately a lead is a like a flag or a signal or an alert,” Allison said. “All it’s telling a salesperson is there is someone somewhere interested in something. That’s all it is. There is an interesting thing in this CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or database that you should check out. And then the person acts on that by trying to turn that into a meeting on their calendar, so they can have a conservation.”
“The workflow goes something like – hey Bill – saw you downloaded a white paper I would love to get 20 minutes of your time tomorrow at 2 p.m. I can send a calendar invite in case that works for you,” Allison said. “Then they will respond and say Trey, I would love to talk but can we do next week. There is an AI that will do the scheduling, so all Bill has to do is show up.”
That same signal works for a customer support role too, Allison said.
Last summer, Kronologic.ai joined the RealCo, long-term accelerator based out of Geekdom in San Antonio.
“I was impressed with the team,” said Chris Saum, a former partner with RealCo, met Allison and Parker at the Collision Conference in New Orleans last May. “I think they have a great founder dynamic. They both push each other and work really well together.”
Saum also liked Kronologic’s technology and the problem it solves for customers.
“There is a real need that is underserved and they are the right team to execute on this,” Saum said.
“I like their story,” said Richard Grote, managing director of RealCo.
Allison and Parker were able to test their mettle with a scrappy version of their software inside a big organization, Grote said. That gave them proof of concept and the data to back that up, he said.
RealCo provides $100,000 investment into a startup for a six percent stake and every company that is accepted into the 15-month long program should be in a position for a Series A round of institutional investment by the end of the program, Grote said.
“We select for teams we think we can help grow into significant companies,” Grote said.
Kronologic met that criteria, he said.
Kronologic is selling a Software as a Service model. Its software integrates with other systems like customer relationship management programs, Zendesk, any system that generates any sort of alert that people need to do something with, Allison said.
“The calendar to us is the new frontier,” Allison said.
Electronic calendars are the way of the world, Parker said.
“More and more the market is starting to use the calendar as an inbox,” Allison said. “It’s like hey instead of sending a message proposing we find time to do something – why don’t we just start with the thing we are all talking about. Why doesn’t the discussion start with the meeting? Instead of dancing around it.”
“Ultimately a company is just a bunch of humans and their time,” Allison said. “We focus on making humans much more human.”