Enrola abandons edtech for AI sales agents, lands $2.1M seed

Enrola, the three-year-old women-founded startup that began life as an education comparison platform, has completed a pivot into AI sales technology backed by a $2.1 million Seed round. The round was led by Purpose Ventures, with existing backers Antler, AfterWork Ventures and Skalata also participating.

The company's shift came after cofounders Jo Thomas and Yvette Quinby built an AI sales agent to convert leads for Enrola's original marketplace. What they found was that the agent, not the marketplace, was the real opportunity. In September last year the startup parked Enrola 1.0 to focus on the agent business, now called Enrola 2.0. The agent answers customer questions and either hands a sales-ready buyer back to the team or closes the sale itself.

Enrola 2.0 targets what the company describes as 'high-consideration B2C' purchases — higher-value services where buying is rarely impulsive. In less than 12 months it has signed 28 customers across education, insurance, fintech, legal services, utilities and comparison. Since the pivot, the platform has processed more than 250,000 leads.

The funding will be used to scale agents that meet buyers wherever they research and decide, and to service more industries and the new ways customers buy. David Johnson, formerly head of GTM automation at UpGuard, has joined as head of growth.

Thomas, Enrola's CEO, argues the buying landscape has already changed. 'Customers research and decide on their own terms now, at any hour, and increasingly with their own AI agents doing the legwork,' she said. 'Most businesses are still set up to sell the way they always have, and they lose buyers in the gap.'

Purpose Ventures MD Derek Gerrard framed the problem in similar terms: nearly every consumer business spends heavily to generate leads, then lets most of them go cold. 'It is an enormous, expensive problem hiding in plain sight,' he said. 'Jo and WA-based Yvette impressed us with their 25 years of experience each, and both understand this category from the inside.'

The round follows an $800,000 pre-Seed raised in late 2024, when Enrola was still an education comparison site launched through the Antler program. The new capital signals investor appetite for AI sales tools that address the lead-leak crisis in B2C businesses — the gap between the moment a buyer shows interest and the moment they decide, where so many are lost.