When Anis Bennaceur and Matthias Wickenburg first met, they were competitors, each building their own startup. Bennaceur was focused on Swipecast, a career platform for creative professionals, while Wickenburg was developing Mixer, a similar venture. But the two entrepreneurs bonded over a shared frustration: sales calls. Both experienced the inefficiencies of these calls firsthand—lack of insights, no automatic transcription, and difficulty in tracking important takeaways.
Attention’s mission? To help sales teams focus on what they do best—selling—while its AI takes care of the details. The company plans to use its fresh funding to automate even more business tasks, with Bennaceur envisioning a future where sales teams run almost on autopilot. "We want companies to have as lean of a team as possible that generates 100x the outputs you used to be able to do before," he said.
A Rocky Start and a Game-Changing Pivot
Bennaceur and Wickenburg first met as competitors. Bennaceur was working on Swipecast, a platform for creative professionals, while Wickenburg was building Mixer, a direct competitor. But they soon realized that they shared a common frustration—sales calls were inefficient. "It was hard to know what was happening," Bennaceur said. "There was nothing to record calls or transcribe the conversation, so it was hard to get volume out of these conversations."
