By Riley Kaminer
When Timothy Keith was working at Miami-based accounting firm Kaufman Rossin, enabling the company to roll out its CRM platform, he fell in love with the subtle complexities of professional services.
“It’s a beautiful industry,” he told Refresh Miami. On the surface, it looks like a company like that provides one standard service: accounting. But actually, Keith would come to realize, there is a constellation of thousands of different services that they can offer their clients.
“But each person at these firms does one particular thing,” he explained. “They’re very siloed in their domains.” That’s a problem since a large portion of professional service companies’ revenue stems from cross-selling.
Fast forward to early 2023 and Keith, alongside CTO Nnamdi Anyanwu and operations/finance head Alexander Diaz, co-founded Propense.ai: a platform that leverages artificial intelligence to enable professional services businesses to maximize their cross-selling revenue by analyzing historical and market data points to reveal revenue opportunities hiding in plain sight.
Today, the company announced that it has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Harlem Capital, with contributions from Operator Collective, New Enterprise Associates (NEA Angel Fund), Florida Opportunity Fund, Glass Family Office, and several angel investors. Last year, Propense.ai raised a $650,000 pre-seed round.
With the fresh capital, Propense.ai plans to further refine its AI models and user-centric product features, focusing on the legal market as a primary area for research and development. CEO Keith shared that a public launch is slated for 2025. Propense.ai’s beta program, which is currently running, includes nine clients. The company currently has 10 full-time employees, three of whom are based in South Florida.
Miami-based Henri Pierre-Jacques, managing partner of Harlem Capital, first met Keith in 2022 at the Black Men Talk Tech conference. “Propense was my 5th led investment in a Miami founder,” he told us. “When I moved to Miami almost 3 years ago, Harlem Capital had zero founders here. Now we have 7 founders and Miami is our 3rd largest city of founders after SF and NYC. I continue to be long Miami and am finding a ton of diverse talent here, which aligns to our mission.”
“I hope Propense can become the go to customer cross-selling software for the professional services industry,” Pierre-Jacques continued. “There are billions left on the table with existing clients. In an environment like now there is more and more emphasis on expanding existing clients versus targeting new clients.”
The company’s mission resonates with the industry’s need for solutions that bridge the gap between service knowledge and sales opportunities. Propense.ai’s platform promises to alleviate the challenges professionals face in cross-selling by providing them with the tools and confidence to proactively recommend services that align with their clients’ objectives.
Anyanwu underscored that Propense.ai is more than simply a recommendation engine. “It’s a comprehensive cross-selling platform that prioritizes human behavior and psychology,” he shared.
For example, think about the total number of sales attempts professionals make – a leading indicator of success in generating new business. “Providing recommendations backed by data encourages professionals to make more sales attempts because it helps them understand how and why their clients can benefit from additional services in the first place,” Anyanwu noted.
“Propense.ai is serving as the conduit for professionals across all different verticals, from accounting to legal to financial services, so they can feel comfortable in making these suggestions,” added Anyanwu. “Integrating AI to automate these processes strengthens their confidence in the process.”
Photo at top of post: Propense.ai’s founders, from left to right: Nnamdi Anyanwu, CTO; Timothy Keith, CEO; and Alexander Diaz, Head of Operations & Finance. The founders first met on a basketball court.
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
- Miami-based Propense.ai launches cross-selling platform with top accounting firms already on board
- Xendoo’s digital accounting platform is used by nearly 1,000 businesses in 13 countries. What’s ahead for this team?
- Finally secures $10M to develop AI-powered small business bookkeeping platform
- $2M FirmPilot fundraise signals bright future for AI-powered law-firm marketing platform
