According to TechCrunch, this is one of those stories where the startup says it raised the money months ago, got busy and only decided to announce the news now. Investors in the seed round include Point Nine, Salesforce Ventures, Y Combinator and undisclosed angels. (PersistIQ was incubated last year at Y Combinator.)

Co-founder and CEO Pouyan Salehi argued that while most online sales tools are focused on specific channels, like email or phone calls, PersistIQ aims to improve the workflow of the entire sales process and to 'be everywhere the sales rep is.'

'We're already at the intersection of email, LinkedIn, Salesforce and a lot of other places,' he said. 'We want to expand and say that as a salesperson, you've got one solution that has your back.'

PersistIQ automates large parts of the outbound sales process, removing duplicates from your database, sending follow-up emails at the right time and personalizing messages - so hopefully, it doesn't feel like that sales pitch was sent by a robot. (PersistIQ describes this as 'automation with the human element.)

The company says it has hundreds of customers, including ZenPayroll, which reports that PersistIQ has made its sales team 10 times (!) more productive.
Newer features include detailed analytics on what is and isn't working, an API to integrate with other sales products and a Chrome extension to pull email addresses from LinkedIn into your sales database.