DALLAS and MIAMI, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Cien Inc., a leading provider of AI-powered sales productivity solutions, today announced it closed a seed equity round and obtained financing, via Spain’s Center for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI).

The proceeds totaling over $1.8M USD will, among other things, be used to fund a Center of Excellence (CoE) for data science and artificial intelligence (AI) in Barcelona. The purpose of the Center is to understand B2B buyer and seller behavior by analyzing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data.

We are honored to have passed CDTI’s stringent due diligence process, as only the most ambitious and viable businesses qualify,” explained Rob Käll, Cien’s CEO who recently presented at the 2018 Artificial Intelligence International Conference in Barcelona: “AI and Human Behavior.”

Cien’s data scientists built the underlying processing architecture which now serves close to 100M AI predictions per day, uncovering tens of millions of dollars of lost sales productivity for enterprise customers.

“I’m extremely pleased with the quality of talent we’re able to recruit. A big reason is that we have been able to establish partnerships with top local research universities that all have internationally recognized data scientist programs, such as Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF),” said Ben Strum, Cien CTO, who holds a graduate degree in Operations Research and Machine Learning from Columbia University.

Cien’s AI-powered sales productivity app has been adopted by B2B SaaS companies around the world. According to IDC Research, AI-powered CRM activities will boost business revenue by $1.1 trillion by 2021 and more than 50% of B2B tech companies are already implementing or planning on introducing AI in their operations.

About Cien
Cien gives sales teams the power of artificial intelligence to increase the productivity and effectiveness of their sales teams. Available on the Salesforce AppExchange, Cien’s app takes into account human and behavioral elements to detect problems, predict outcomes and recommend the shortest path to success. For more information, visit www.cien.ai.

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Damien Acheson
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SOURCE Cien, Inc.