The news: Falkon, a Seattle-based sales and marketing analytics startup, has raised $16 million. The tech: Falkon uses API connections to pull data from all major go-to-market data sources including Salesforce, Outreach and Google Analytics, among others. Co-founder and CEO Mona Akmal told GeekWire that it can also connect to customer data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Microsoft's Azure. It then uses this data to create data-driven recommendations for sales and marketing teams using AI. The team: The company was founded in late 2019 by a trio of tech vets.

Accountability is a uniquely human ethical priority--one we should embed in the tools we use and the systems that surround them. As the Chief Procurement Officer of BAM. Inc., Akmal considered himself more progressive than CPOs at other companies, and he had the suite of predictive AI tools to prove it. "There's more to procurement than managing constraints and winning in the margins," he had said to the CFO when making the case for the system. "We need more visibility into our supplier tiers, and we have got to be more nimble." The CFO was somewhat less than enthusiastic at first.

As the Chief Procurement Officer of BAM. Inc., Akmal considered himself more progressive than CPOs at other companies, and he had the suite of predictive AI tools to prove it. "There's more to procurement than managing constraints and winning in the margins," he had said to the CFO when making the case for the system. "We need more visibility into our supplier tiers, and we have got to be more nimble." The CFO was somewhat less than enthusiastic at first. What was a CPO doing thinking about AI anyway? After some convincing, however, the CFO signed off on the investment and the Chief Technology Officer joined the effort to bring AI to procurement at BAM, Inc.