Othello Raises $8M to Coach Sales Reps While the Buyer Is Still on the Call

Othello, a New York company that builds AI models for live sales calls, announced an $8 million seed round on Wednesday, October 14, 2026. a16z speedrun, Owl Capital and Long Journey Ventures invested, according to the company's announcement.

Othello's model, Hamlet, shows reps suggestions in under 500 milliseconds, as pop-ups over any dialer or video call. It doesn't join the meeting as a participant. The prompts cover the next discovery question, MEDDPICC or Challenger steps the rep has skipped, product and technical answers, objection handling, competitor positioning and which case study to share.

The numbers

• Round: $8 million seed, with angels including founders from DoorDash, Ripple, Hugging Face and Deel.

• Customers: more than 50 large enterprises, including Microsoft, Capital One and Lyft, per the company.

• Usage: Othello says reps adopt it within a week and use it on 95% or more of their calls. Those figures are company-reported.

• Market forecast cited: Gartner expects 60% of B2B seller work to run through conversational interfaces by 2028, up from less than 5% in 2023.

Co-founder and CEO Jared Zelman's argument is that sales teams have plenty of software before a conversation and after it, and almost none during it.

Why it matters

Much of the sales AI news we've covered this year sits before the call, like the outbound agents Salesforce is building, or after it, in call analysis. Othello is betting on the minutes in between, where a missed objection can lose a deal.

In-call coaching helps once the buyer is talking. It can't create the meeting, and it can't tell the rep why this buyer said yes to it. In traxy's view, the calls that go best usually start with someone who already knows the seller, such as a prospect who commented on the rep's post last week. That context comes from engagement signals gathered before anyone dials.

traxy detects which buyers engage with your LinkedIn content, qualifies them against your ICP automatically, and delivers them to Slack or your CRM while the attention is still warm. Start with a 7-day free trial.

Sources: Othello via PR Newswire, "Othello Raises $8 Million for Real-Time AI Sales Coaching During Live Calls" (October 14, 2026).