For decades, companies have tried to tackle The Great Sales Challenge: how to make B2B sellers more effective so more deals close faster. New waves of sales technology bubble up now and then, promising to fix The Great Sales Challenge once and for all. First it was CRMs. Then revenue intelligence. Now, companies are using AI. While each technology has produced genuine value in one way or another, the key piece of information — the bit that could help sellers overcome The Great Sales Challenge — remains elusive: insight into how a customer actually buys. Without this information, deals still stall, buying processes remain unclear, and visibility vanishes as soon as a deal moves from seller to buyer.
Indeed, 83% of the enterprise purchasing journey happens internally, in meetings and threads and document reviews that sellers have no visibility into and no way to influence. This is where deals are won or lost, and it’s precisely where the sales stack goes silent.
This visibility gap is a structural problem, one Digital Sales Room pioneer Aligned says it has fixed. And, based on the company’s recent round of funding, it looks like investors agree. Led by PeakSpan Capital, Aligned raised a $60 million Series B to build a new “execution layer” in the sales revenue stack, where deals run in real time. The AI Deal Workplace, where sellers, buyers, and their AI agents run deals together, now has $73.8 million in total funding from investors including Hetz Ventures, JAL Ventures, and NFX, the largest round to date in this category. Today, Aligned’s platform is used by more than 70,000 sellers and 1 million buyers to run deals every month.
“Beyond simply how to sell more efficiently and effectively is a far more important question: How does the buyer want to buy?” said Matt Melymuka, co-founder and managing partner, PeakSpan Capital. “Aligned is reframing the conversation around the buyer – ensuring sellers are viewed as trusted thought partners, enabling buyers to buy the way they want to. And the results — in terms of increased win rates, shorter sales cycles, increased deal sizes — are tremendous.”
Already, Aligned has amassed a following, with enterprise customers like Deel, SimilarWeb, and WordPress reporting 30% faster sales cycles and 15% higher win rates. In fact, Aligned has experienced rapid growth since inception, tripling ARR over the last 12 months. It has been recognized by G2 as the category leader in Digital Sales Rooms, ranking No. 1 for SMB, Mid-Market, and Client Portal in the Summer 2026 reports.
Rise of the Digital Sales Room | The Evolution to the AI Deal Workplace: Aligned’s Value
It’s important to understand that CRMs and revenue intelligence platforms both have a place in the sales cycle. CRMs are systems of record; they capture what happened. Revenue intelligence platforms are systems of insight; they help sellers understand patterns. Both are useful tools that continue to be of value. But neither one was designed to be a place where buyers and sellers actually move a deal forward together. Instead, that work happens across email threads, shared folders, scattered attachments, and fragmented feedback loops. By the time a buying committee has aligned internally, a seller is often the last to know, and is unable to have any effect on the outcome.
And, that’s where Aligned steps in. “There has been an explosion in new startups and investment in the sales technology space over the last decade, and as a result, most teams use a variety of tools to optimize every step of their process. This is certainly helpful, and innovation in the category has been remarkable,” said Melymuka.
One such tool is the Digital Sales Room, a microsite in which buyers and sellers collaborate throughout a deal in real time. The Digital Sales Room market is expanding rapidly, as B2B buyers increasingly prefer self-guided evaluation experiences. In fact, the global DSR market is set to grow to $9.8 billion by 2034. And Gartner recently predicted that by 2028, 30% of all B2B sales cycles will be primarily run through a Digital Sales Room.
Aligned now adds a layer, the execution layer, to the Digital Sales Room where AI can see what’s happening inside a deal so the seller can have some effect on its outcome. So, where CRMs are the system of record and revenue intelligence platforms are the system of insight, Aligned is now the System of Action, which adds context to a deal: It understands which stakeholders are engaged, what they’re spending time on, where momentum is building and where it’s stalling, and what questions still need answers before a decision gets made. Buyers get a clearer path to internal consensus, and sellers get visibility before a deal goes cold. We now see an extension of the Digital Sales Room to the AI Deal Workplace.
It’s clear that overcoming The Great Sales Challenge isn’t simply a matter of better salesmanship or incentives. It can’t be cured with more data, forecasting or coaching tools. Rather, it’s recognizing a missing piece in the process of enterprise sales in the 21st century; that is, visibility into the buyer’s journey. Significant opportunity awaits the company that overcomes this challenge. Perhaps Melymuka put it best: “Whoever owns the surface where buyers and sellers transact owns the next decade of GTM software.” It looks like Aligned is well-positioned to do just that.
