Sri Kamma, CEO of FunnelAI

FunnelAI, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to generate leads for car dealers, announced Wednesday that it has raised a $1.5 million seed round of financing.

The San Antonio-based startup previously raised $375,000 in pre-seed stage funding and participated in the RealCo Accelerator, based at Geekdom.

San Antonio-based Active Capital, which last month announced it had closed on a $21.5 million fund to invest in early-stage business to business software as a service startups, led the round. Other investors included Geekdom Fund, True, based in London, and angels from San Antonio and Houston.

FunnelAI, which has eight employees in San Antonio and one in Austin, plans to use the funds to hire additional full stack engineers, sales and marketing and customer service employees, said Sri Kamma, CEO of FunnelAI.

RealCo, a business to business focused, long-term accelerator program, recruited FunnelAI to San Antonio from Austin in July of 2017. The startup participated in RealCo’s first accelerator cohort.

Active Capital got to know the founders through RealCo and invested in its pre-seed round about six months ago, said Pat Matthews, CEO and Founder of Active Capital.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with Sri over the last few months,” Matthews said. “It just made a lot of sense for us to be the lead investor.”

FunnelAI shares offices with Active Capital in downtown San Antonio.

“First and foremost, it’s a great founding team. I think they’ve got a big vision. They’ve done an amazing job of staying focused to get the business going. With a lot of entrepreneurs, it’s hard to focus. They’ve got a platform that is beneficial to a number of industries,” Matthews said.

“I love the progress they’ve made,” Matthews said. “They’ve made so much progress on so little capital.”

FunnelAI is a sales and marketing platform that uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processsing and data to help connect businesses to potential customers.

FunnelAI’s product works for real estate, auto-dealers, financial services, but it’s hyper focused on the auto industry right now,  Kamma said.

The startup harvests data from social media platforms like Reddit and car enthusiast forums looking for prospective customers that might want to buy a new car, used car, service or parts, auto loans, or auto insurance. It then provides the leads to sales managers.

FunnelAI has 78 customers, including  BMW of Austin, Mercedes Benz of Austin, a few dealerships in Louisiana, BMW of Los Angeles, Kamma said.