Othello has raised $8 million in seed funding to develop AI models that provide sales representatives with real-time recommendations while they are speaking with customers.
The investment included a16z speedrun, Owl Capital and Long Journey Ventures, alongside angel investors including DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang, Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen and Sentry co-founder David Cramer.
Founded by Jared Zelman and Raphael Assor, Othello is building an AI system that analyzes conversations as they happen. Its proprietary model, Hamlet, processes live discussions and provides contextual suggestions through a desktop application, helping sales representatives respond to objections, explain product features and identify relevant information.
Unlike conventional sales intelligence platforms that primarily analyze recorded conversations after meetings end, Othello attempts to influence outcomes during the call itself. The company says Hamlet can generate recommendations in under 500 milliseconds and that its customers include Microsoft, Capital One and Lyft.
The technical challenge is delivering useful recommendations quickly enough to affect a conversation without distracting the person conducting it. Othello will also need to demonstrate that real-time assistance leads to measurable improvements in sales performance rather than simply generating more information for representatives to process.