Elucify, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class wants to solve an annoying and persistent problem for sales people — making sure they have the most recent customer contact data.
To solve this problem, the company created a plug-in for Salesforce.com CRM based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. The system connects to various public and private data sources looking for the most current contact information, according to Gerald Fong, Elucify CEO and co-founder.
Sales personnel simply click the Elucify button in the Salesforce record, and the tool updates the existing contact information and lists any new contacts found at the company. Typically it looks at information such as phone number, email address, current decision makers, updated company information — all the types of data a busy sales team needs. It usually takes just 5 or 10 seconds to update the record, according to Fong.
 
“The pain point we are focusing on is the pain sales teams run into every day. They spend time hunting for [good contact] data every day. Instead of spending time on the phone, they are spending a lot of time on various websites trying to verify [contact] information,” Fong told TechCrunch.
In most companies this forces people to spend time manually cleaning up their contact information, but Elucify automates that process on a per record basis.
Most sales teams work with Customer Relationship Management tools like Salesforce to track this information. As such, you wouldn’t think this would be a huge problem, but according to data from eConsultancy, sales and marketing pros estimate that as much as 30 percent of their contact data is bad.
The company has only been in existence for a few months, yet it went from ideation to Y Combinator in a matter of week, and it already already boasts three Beta customers.
The three company co-founders — which include Fong, Mihir Deo and Naveen Krishnamurthi — have found being part of Y Combinator has given them access to people with experience starting enterprise companies. The founders got YC president Sam Altman as their advisor and as young founders, they are finding the advice they are getting is helping them solve problems and open doors.
“We are starting an enterprise software company. Getting someone to pay you money is difficult. We are talking to people [in the Y Combinator network] about what mistakes they made and what problems we are thinking about,” Fong said.
Their advisors and network contacts have already considered many of the issues they face on a daily basis and are helping them identify where to focus their energies.
As for the future, they just want to keep building on their early wins. CRM is a huge market and Salesforce has 60 percent of that market, Wong pointed out.
“Our goals to make a big dent in the [market of] people using Salesforce.” If they can do that, that’s a lot of potential customers. Down the road they hope to add their functionality to other CRM tools as well.
