27 Year Old Former D1 Hockey Player Just Transformed Salesforce Data Entry With AI And Raised $2.7M From Top Investors

Former hockey player switches to tech and raised $2.7 million for AI driven sales force application software, Rollio

Jake Soffer is a computer engineer and former D1 hockey player. He recently raised $2.7 million for Rollio, an AI-driven sales force application software, to transform companies’ data entry experience in several industries. 

Jake grew up in Maryland, playing hockey all his life. In 2013, he got recruited to play NCAA D1 ice hockey at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where he also studied Computer Engineering.

During college, Jake worked as an analyst intern, entering salesforce data used to track investments. He quickly realized how inefficient and error-prone this manual method was and wondered why there wasn’t a more efficient tool to translate spoken data from meetings into a CRM. From that point, Jake began developing a more accessible solution to using Salesforce, asking friends who worked in sales to send him their meeting notes, updating their CRM’s right then and there. They were saving hours on hand with more accurate reports and forecasts.

Subsequently, Jake submitted his prototype for Rollio to the Change the World Hackathon competition and won. He also won second place in the Business Model Canvas competition, where he was awarded a $5,000 grant for further AI research.

Jake later pitched his idea to Carsten Thoma, a business visionary who pioneered enterprise commerce and was CEO of SAP’s CRM/Customer XP business globally at the time. Thoma understood and appreciated Jake’s vision of transforming data entry with AI, specifically natural language processing (NLP).

Rollio saves sales and service reps an average of 20 hours per month from updating their CRM manually and helps companies collect higher data quality with robotic process automation (RPA). Rollio continually surveys CRM’s, spotting bad or missing data, and prompts reps to update it via voice or text before managers even notice it. They’ve created a two-way conversation between user to CRM and CRM to user.

Rollio uses voice detection technology through accurately translated actionable CRM data; they use a proprietary Phonetic Algorithm to understand company and personal lingo and accents. Additionally, one of Rollio’s top priorities is their customer’s security, which they guarantee by ensuring that people’s voice data and speech-to-text information is never shared.

Currently, Rollio is working with several companies like CapitalOne and Macquarie.