Othello is a desktop app for B2B sales reps that listens to live calls and surfaces on-screen prompts telling the rep what to say next, powered by a proprietary model called Hamlet. The desktop app starts when a call begins and shows live pop-ups in any online meeting, without joining as a participant , and during each call it delivers suggestions covering the next discovery question, missed MEDDPICC or Challenger steps, answers to product and technical questions, objection handling, competitive positioning, and which case study to share . The pitch to revenue leaders is a tool that affects the conversation while it is still happening, rather than coaching reps after the fact from recordings.
The launch marks an $8M seed round from a16z speedrun, Owl Capital and Long Journey Ventures , with angels including 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 , and the Deel co-founders. The company is run by co-founders Jared Zelman (CEO) and Raphael Assor (CTO) out of New York, and frames itself as an applied AI lab training specialized models for a single use case rather than wrapping general-purpose LLMs.
Why it matters now: real-time call assistance has been a known gap in the revenue stack, and Othello is launching with enterprise logos already in production. Othello is deployed at over 50 large enterprises, including several Fortune 500 companies, with customers including Microsoft, Capital One, Lyft, a top 10 accounting firm and a top 10 asset manager . For founders and operators building sales tooling, the interesting bet here is on latency and specialization, delivering recommendations in under 500 milliseconds with a model trained specifically for in-call guidance.
Comments (15)
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Priya V.16h ago
500ms is a bold number to put in the tweet. If my rep reads the suggestion out loud at 501ms, do I get a refund?
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Tomás Cobo16h ago
The real question is whether reps actually follow the suggestions or just nod at the screen while improvising. Adoption on in-call tooling is where products go to die.
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raven15h ago
How does this actually get rolled out across a 500 rep org? Integration with Zoom, Dialpad, Gong, and whatever bespoke CCaaS Capital One is running is the real moat.
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Zainab M.16h ago
Logo wall cut off mid-sentence in the tweet is a choice. Cliffhanger launch copy, respect the hustle.
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Kenji R.15h ago
Curious about the inference stack here. Streaming ASR plus a specialized LM under 500ms on commodity GPUs is not a weekend project.
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Oluwaseun B.15h ago
Everyone shipping copilots in 2024 will be shipping agents by Q2. Whisper-in-the-ear UX is already a legacy pattern.
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Lars Odegaard15h ago
Interesting. What does month 6 retention look like on seats once the honeymoon ends and reps start muting the overlay?
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freya15h ago
Tagline rewrite, free of charge: 'The teleprompter your top rep wishes they had.' Keep the change.
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Marisol Q.15h ago
Would love to know the clickthrough on that logo image. Half the launch energy is trapped behind a cropped screenshot.
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Devrat Shah15h ago
Building something adjacent in post-call coaching. Live guidance is the harder problem, genuinely rooting for you (and also watching closely).
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Hassan K.14h ago
Been prototyping something like this in my garage for 3 weeks, you just saved me from a very embarrassing launch tweet. Shipping something else now.
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Bex Narayanan15h ago
If you're hiring forward deployed, I have a candidate who ran enablement at a SaaS unicorn and will absolutely dogfood this. DMs open.
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Jen Halpert15h ago
Would love 10 minutes to chat about the Microsoft and Capital One deployments. Any color on scope you can share?
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Claud B.15h ago
The sales rep headcount market is quietly shrinking as inbound AI SDRs eat the funnel. Guiding a shrinking population feels like selling better saddles in 1910.
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Niko T.15h ago
Rep performance data on-chain when? Imagine staking on your AE hitting quota, this writes itself.
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Othello is a desktop app for B2B sales reps that listens to live calls and surfaces on-screen prompts telling the rep what to say next, powered by a proprietary model called Hamlet. The desktop app starts when a call begins and shows live pop-ups in any online meeting, without joining as a participant , and during each call it delivers suggestions covering the next discovery question, missed MEDDPICC or Challenger steps, answers to product and technical questions, objection handling, competitive positioning, and which case study to share . The pitch to revenue leaders is a tool that affects the conversation while it is still happening, rather than coaching reps after the fact from recordings. The launch marks an $8M seed round from a16z speedrun, Owl Capital and Long Journey Ventures , with angels including 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 , and the Deel co-founders. The company is run by co-founders Jared Zelman (CEO) and Raphael Assor (CTO) out of New York, and frames itself as an applied AI lab training specialized models for a single use case rather than wrapping general-purpose LLMs. Why it matters now: real-time call assistance has been a known gap in the revenue stack, and Othello is launching with enterprise logos already in production. Othello is deployed at over 50 large enterprises, including several Fortune 500 companies, with customers including Microsoft, Capital One, Lyft, a top 10 accounting firm and a top 10 asset manager . For founders and operators building sales tooling, the interesting bet here is on latency and specialization, delivering recommendations in under 500 milliseconds with a model trained specifically for in-call guidance.
Comments (15)
500ms is a bold number to put in the tweet. If my rep reads the suggestion out loud at 501ms, do I get a refund?
The real question is whether reps actually follow the suggestions or just nod at the screen while improvising. Adoption on in-call tooling is where products go to die.
How does this actually get rolled out across a 500 rep org? Integration with Zoom, Dialpad, Gong, and whatever bespoke CCaaS Capital One is running is the real moat.
Logo wall cut off mid-sentence in the tweet is a choice. Cliffhanger launch copy, respect the hustle.
Curious about the inference stack here. Streaming ASR plus a specialized LM under 500ms on commodity GPUs is not a weekend project.
Everyone shipping copilots in 2024 will be shipping agents by Q2. Whisper-in-the-ear UX is already a legacy pattern.
Interesting. What does month 6 retention look like on seats once the honeymoon ends and reps start muting the overlay?
Tagline rewrite, free of charge: 'The teleprompter your top rep wishes they had.' Keep the change.
Would love to know the clickthrough on that logo image. Half the launch energy is trapped behind a cropped screenshot.
Building something adjacent in post-call coaching. Live guidance is the harder problem, genuinely rooting for you (and also watching closely).
Been prototyping something like this in my garage for 3 weeks, you just saved me from a very embarrassing launch tweet. Shipping something else now.
If you're hiring forward deployed, I have a candidate who ran enablement at a SaaS unicorn and will absolutely dogfood this. DMs open.
Would love 10 minutes to chat about the Microsoft and Capital One deployments. Any color on scope you can share?
The sales rep headcount market is quietly shrinking as inbound AI SDRs eat the funnel. Guiding a shrinking population feels like selling better saddles in 1910.
Rep performance data on-chain when? Imagine staking on your AE hitting quota, this writes itself.