Othello raises $8M seed to coach salespeople through live calls
What's the deal? OthelloDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a startup that uses AI to give salespeople real-time coaching during calls, has raised an $8 million seed round. a16z SpeedrunDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Owl CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → led, with angel investors including DoorDash cofounder Andy FangDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Hugging Face cofounder Thomas WolfDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Chime cofounder Ryan KingDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Ripple founder Chris LarsenDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
How it works: Othello listens to video calls and, trained on a company's uploaded sales and product materials, suggests questions, answers tricky queries, and flags missed opportunities through an on-screen overlay. The company says its models are trained on 20 million hours of recorded sales calls and integrate with Google Workspace, Salesforce, Slack, and ServiceNow. Customers include Microsoft and Capital One.
Why now? Founder Jared Zelman, 24, says the idea grew out of his previous startup, CiceroDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, where he struggled to sell to enterprise prospects. He once had a friend stand behind his computer holding cue cards during sales calls. "Too many good deals are killed by bad calls," he said.
By the numbers: The round lands in the top 3% of all US seed rounds for marketing startups, based on a sample of more than 6,000 comparable deals.
What's the endgame? Othello plans to grow its engineering team, lifting head count to around 80 from 20. It also wants to coach individual sellers on their strengths and weaknesses, and Zelman envisions the product being used in in-person meetings via smart glasses.
What could go wrong? Othello is a much smaller challenger to rivals such as Gong and Salesloft, which have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and carry multibillion-dollar valuations. Salesloft also offers real-time coaching, and larger players like Salesforce or HubSpot could launch similar tools.
The signal: Zelman argues Othello's edge is speed and accuracy — recommendations delivered in milliseconds and refined through reinforcement learning. "Providing real-time recommendations is so damn hard because if it's too slow or not smart enough, it's really unhelpful and very, very distracting," he said. The bet is that a narrow focus on the live call — the one part of selling that can't be automated away — is enough to carve out room against better-funded incumbents.
Read more: Business Insider
Image credit: Othello
