Othello has raised $8 million in Seed funding to expand its real-time AI sales coaching platform, which provides sales representatives with live recommendations while customer conversations are still in progress.
The financing came from a16z speedrun, Owl Capital, and Long Journey Ventures. Angel investors include DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, Sentry co-founder David Cramer, Writer co-founder Waseem AlShikh, Axonius co-founder Dean Sysman, Deel co-founders Alex and Philippe Bouaziz, and TransDigm CEO Kevin Stein.
New York-based Othello is developing AI specifically for live sales conversations rather than focusing primarily on pre-call preparation or post-call analysis. Its platform is powered by Hamlet, a proprietary model designed to generate coaching suggestions in under 500 milliseconds.
Othello operates through a desktop application that launches when a call begins and displays pop-up recommendations over online meeting and calling platforms without joining the conversation as a participant.
During calls, the system can suggest which discovery questions a representative should ask next, identify missed steps from sales methodologies such as MEDDPICC and Challenger, provide potential responses to technical or product questions, help address objections, surface competitive positioning, recommend relevant case studies, and identify signals that a buyer may be ready to move forward.
The company said its technology is already deployed across more than 50 large enterprises, including several Fortune 500 companies. Customers include Microsoft, Capital One, and Lyft, as well as a top 10 accounting firm and a top 10 asset manager.
Othello serves sales organizations in industries including insurance, accounting, financial services, asset management, enterprise software, cybersecurity, healthcare, manufacturing, and professional services.
The company said licensed sales representatives typically adopt Othello within a week of downloading the application and use the technology on at least 95% of their calls. Othello also said it is adding several multinational enterprise customers each week.
Othello was co-founded by CEO Jared Zelman and Raphael Assor. The company is positioning Hamlet as a purpose-built model for environments where latency and deal context are particularly important, with the goal of influencing sales execution while conversations are happening rather than simply analyzing them afterward.
The Seed funding will support Othello as it expands adoption among large enterprises and continues developing its models and real-time coaching capabilities.
KEY QUOTES:
“There is a ton of technology before the conversation and way too much after it ends, but not a single tool that affects how you perform during the call. That’s not a software problem. It’s an AI problem. The only way to give smart recommendations in real time, with the full context of a deal, is to train AI models just for that.”
Jared Zelman, Co-Founder And CEO Of Othello
