Othello uses AI to tell salespeople what to say during calls. See the pitch deck that helped it raise $8 million.

Jared Zelman has been honing his sales pitch since college, when he spent his spare time cold-emailing billionaires and prominent investors, hoping to forge a connection.

His extracurricular activities helped lay the groundwork for his current startup, Othello, a platform that uses AI to give salespeople real-time coaching tips to improve their sales calls.

Othello exclusively told CMO Insider on Wednesday that it had raised an $8 million seed funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s startup accelerator A16z Speedrun, and Owl Capital.

Othello listens in on video calls and uses AI trained on a company’s uploaded sales and product materials to suggest questions to ask, answer tricky queries, and flag missed opportunities in real time through an on-screen overlay. “Too many good deals are killed by bad calls,” said Zelman, who is now 24 and was using Othello to help respond to questions during our interview.

Zelman said he evolved the idea for Othello at his second startup, Cicero, which created AI avatars for prominent authors and podcasters.

Zelman said he struggled to sell the idea to enterprise prospects and used to have a friend stand behind his computer holding up cue cards to help steer him through his sales calls. “I was like, ‘Hey, I’m just going to build this for everybody,'” Zelman said. “In sales, you can outsource and use AI to do everything except for the one important part of the job, which is the sales call.” Othello says its AI models are trained on 20 million hours of recorded sales calls and that its platform can be integrated with business software platforms such as Google Workspace, Salesforce, Slack, and ServiceNow.

The company says customers’ data is not used to train AI models shared with other businesses.

Its customers include Microsoft and Capital One.

Othello isn’t the first company to use AI to help salespeople.

It’s a much smaller challenger to rivals such as Gong and Salesloft, which offer tools to analyze sales conversations, with Salesloft also providing real-time coaching.

Gong and Salesloft have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and have multibillion-dollar valuations.

Zelman said Othello’s advantage lies in the speed and accuracy of its proprietary AI models, which deliver recommendations in milliseconds and improve from recorded sales calls using reinforcement learning.

He said its singular focus on offering this type of in-call solution will also give it an advantage if an enterprise tech company like Salesforce or HubSpot chose to launch a similar product. “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,” Zelman said.

Othello could also prove useful for chief marketing officers, Zelman said, by helping ensure salespeople actually use the materials created for them, while giving marketing teams insights into which messages are most effective at converting customers.

Othello plans to invest the funds in growing its engineering team.

Zelman said he anticipates increasing the company’s head count to around 80 employees, from 20 currently.

The startup is also planning to improve the product to focus on coaching individual sellers on their strengths and weaknesses, beyond optimizing its recommendations based on learnings from a company’s best performers.

In the future, he envisioned the product being used for in-person meetings via smart glasses.

A group of individual investors including DoorDash cofounder Andy Fang, Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf, Chime cofounder Ryan King, and Ripple founder Chris Larsen invested in the funding round.

Check out the pitch deck Othello used to secure its $8 million seed investment, shared exclusively with CMO Insider.

Some of the slides have been omitted or redacted.