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

Othello, cofounded by Jared Zelman and Raphael Assor, just raised an $8 million seed funding round.

Othello Othello gives salespeople real-time, AI-powered recommendations to improve their sales calls.

It uses reinforcement learning to coach reps in pitches modeled on their company's top performers.

Othello just raised $8 million in a round led by A16z Speedrun and Owl Capital.

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.