Smaller companies are just as eager to use AI technology to supercharge their sales processes as their larger competitors. However, they often lack the in-house IT expertise or capital to implement enterprise-level tools such as OpenAI or Anthropic.
Darwin AI, an AI startup based in Brazil, is developing a conversational AI assistant for small businesses across Latin America that want to get involved with AI but lack IT staff. The assistant is designed to interact with customers in a more human way to help generate more revenue. If the conversation escalates, either negatively or becomes a sales master, it will bring a human to continue the conversation.
This is the second company for Lautaro Schiaffino and Ezequiel Sculli, who previously co-founded Sirena.app, a shared inbox tool for WhatsApp for mid-market companies. They grew the company to $15 million in annual recurring revenue and a presence in 25 countries before selling it to Zenvia in 2020.
Schiaffino and Sculli left Zenvia in 2022 and began discussing what to do next. They knew they wanted to help that same market and take complex technology and simplify it for those who didn’t have the technical team or time and skill to develop something themselves.
“Artificial intelligence is a great opportunity, but difficult to implement for small businesses,” Schiaffino told TechCrunch. “We’ve seen the evolution of the mid-market as business-to-consumer in Latin America realized that there are a lot of potential customers, but the conversion rate is low. People have to talk to 100 or 200 customers to sell a product.”
So Schiaffino and Sculli began developing the Darwin AI system that connects to a company’s customer relationship management tool and evaluates potential sales leads and escalates those most likely to buy to a human salesperson. Using artificial intelligence, Darwin takes into account the needs of companies and then filters leads and customers. Schiaffino described it as a two-sided system that “talks” to employees and customers to promote the most important customers.
As more companies implement automation into their processes, the AI conversational market is expected to follow suit are growing over 20% annually by 2030. This has attracted a number of startups looking to solve this for businesses, most recently Rasa, Kore.ai, DXwand and OpenDialog.
Meanwhile, the company continues to shape AI by onboarding more users. Darwin is also close to implementing a self-learning AI feature that will get a company up and running in days without the need for a dedicated IT team.
Since launching in 2023, Darwin has processed thousands of conversations and has customers in countries including Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. The company is on track to reach over 1 million conversations this year. It also has Zapier integration and can connect to regional CRMs.
The company brought in revenue from the beginning. In fact, the founders realized they had a hit when customers paid before there was even a user interface, Schiaffino said, though he declined to say how much revenue Darwin generates. Darwin has a setup fee, a monthly fixed plan and also charges a usage fee per chat. Additional tiers of plans are coming this year.
Darwin has raised a total of $2.5 million, including pre-seed and a seed round. Canary led the most recent $2.1 million round and was joined by H20 Capital Innovation, Dalus Capital, FJ Labs and Latitude Capital.
“The funds will go to product development, marketing and also the business teams to guarantee the quality of the product,” Schiaffino said.
