Avarra announced an $8 million seed round of funding and the general availability of the industry’s first fully interactive, AI-avatar-based enterprise application. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the funding round, which included participation from the GTM Fund, Firsthand Alliance, and industry leaders, including John W. Thompson.
The first iteration of this application solves the intractable, decades-old problem of effectively training and ramping up sales professionals. Avarra’s powerful simulation platform leverages large-language models (LLMs) and 3D-avatars to accurately simulate customer sales meetings. This enables sales professionals to virtually get the experience (at-bats) and in-depth coaching needed to be productive in weeks instead of quarters without losing valuable prospects.
Despite spending billions of dollars annually on sales enablement, this typically takes multiple quarters for new professionals to become productive or learn how to sell new products. And this is because existing sales enablement and training approaches focus on giving reps, sales engineers and other sales professionals knowledge, but what they really need is experience.
Avarra provides realistic 3D AI avatars trained from web-meeting transcripts and best practice playbooks that accurately simulate customer sales calls. Reps join a Zoom meeting and can interact as if speaking to a real customer or prospect. And the Avarra avatar sales coach then provides feedback based on the customer’s sales methodology and best practices. This gives sales professionals a safe and effective place to get the “at-bats” they need to truly be productive–dramatically cutting the time and cost of ramping up new hires, launching new products, and rolling out best practices.
KEY QUOTES:
“Advances in LLMs and 3D avatars are enabling an entirely new class of enterprise applications. In a world of AI-hype, Avarra is delivering a game-changing solution that can be immediately deployed to sales teams to solve a previously intractable multi-billion dollar problem and make an immediate business impact for enterprise companies. And this is just the first version of the product, there are so many more applications for this technology from coaching to interviewing to come.”
-Arif Janmohamed, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners
“Everywhere simulation has been implemented it has revolutionized entire industries by dramatically shortening cycle times and lowering costs. The convergence of LLMs and 3D-avatars is for the first time bringing the power of simulation to complex people-to-people processes such as enterprise selling. Companies who adopt Avarra simulations can dramatically cut the time to ramp new hires or launch new products, accelerating market share gains and improving customer satisfaction.”
-David Knight, co-founder and CEO of Avarra
“We’re using Avarra to roll out a new pitch and demo script to our entire sales organization and it’s a real game-changer. I strongly believe great coaching is built around deep practice, and that repeated isolation drills are needed to learn and retain any new skill. With Avarra our reps are able to gain realistic experiences in a fraction of the time it used to take, and since it’s a simulation they are learning with virtual customers instead of sacrificing valuable prospects.”
-Kyle Norton, Chief Revenue Officer of Owner.com
