Invest in Namecoach

Namecoach is an award-winning AI system already used by 400+ educational institutions and businesses to initially solve one single, ubiquitous problem: name mispronunciation.  We embed accurate name audio name pronunciations and automated phonetic spellings into the tools people use every day, to finally make it easy to say any name right.  And names are just the start. Backed by the same investors as Anthropic, OpenAI, Oura Ring, Meta and Airbnb — Namecoach is setting a new standard for more meaningful AI-enhanced communication within the broader $100B Voice AI market.

Why are these Tier 1 VC’s backing us?  Though the initial problem we’re solving might seem niche, name mispronunciation is a major overlooked challenge, and a range of customers from Fortune 500 companies to top educational institutions like Stanford already trust Namecoach to help build meaningful social rapport and business relationships just by solving this one problem well within their organizations.

And with strong business metrics and unit economics, solving this single problem is clearly creating massive practical value for our 4+ million users and 400+ customers, and therefore creating quickly growing enterprise value for our shareholders.

Namecoach received an incredible feature and direct investment from Crowdscale, an outlet focused on startup investing for the masses. They lauded our high gross profit margins, ever improving model powered by machine learning, and massive growth potential as a strong case for investment.

We’re proud to be a top-rated deal on Kingscrowd, the leading private markets investment data platform. Additionally we received a direct investment from Kingscrowd after extensive due diligence from their team.

An Astoundingly Widespread Problem

These investors are betting our on growth, in part because our traction so far is truly just scratching the surface - we did the research and the math, and name pronunciation turns out to be an astoundingly big problem space that has largely gone overlooked.

And this is just in the United States. With 80% of names having multiple pronunciations, it’s no surprise they’re often said wrong. The result? Trust vanishes in a single syllable.

Research from MIT shows that individuals whose names are consistently mispronounced experience lower confidence and decreased participation, key drivers of productivity and success.

Mispronounced names aren’t just a momentary slip - in educational environments, getting a name wrong has been shown to alienate students, leading to disengagement and poorer learning outcomes. In business, it translates to lost opportunities, weakened rapport, and reduced team cohesion. 

And our users remind us every day that there’s not just a practical cost here — there is a deep emotional pain point for many, as our partners at P&G highlight in this especially moving video:

The Namecoach Solution

Our platform helps users across business and educational settings foster stronger connections and create a more welcoming environment—one name at a time.  We embed accurate audio name pronunciations and phonetic spellings right where users need them, at their fingertips in the tools that they use every day, from Salesforce to Outlook to Canvas.  By making it far easier to learn and remember names whenever and wherever needed, we make name mispronunciation and hesitation a thing of the past.

Namecoach AI in the Canvas Learning Management System

With little to no onboarding required, organizations can embed Namecoach effortlessly into existing workflows, creating natural network effects as more users adopt the platform and contribute to its growing database of accurate name pronunciations.

Namecoach remains accessible throughout multiple interactions—whether in email threads, virtual meetings, cold calls or large-scale events such as client presentations, conferences or graduations—ensuring accurate name pronunciation and fostering stronger relationships at every step.

Using a combination of user-verified audio and the world’s largest dataset of name pronunciations, our award-winning, patented, and proprietary AI-based system analyzes factors such as nationality, ethnicity, gender, and location to recommend the most likely pronunciation—even for the many names with multiple genuine variations. This allows our system to help our users feel confident that they know how to say a particular individual's name the way they want it to be said. Personalized, context-aware, accurate pronunciation is what makes Namecoach such an important tool in the communication toolkit.

Our Expanding Business Model

Our annual B2B SaaS subscriptions serve Higher Education institutions, K12 districts, and Enterprise clients with flexible, scalable solutions tailored to their needs. A key focus in 2025 will be Namecoach for Events, our groundbreaking tool that virtually guarantees 100% accuracy in name pronunciation at graduation ceremonies, setting the new standard for name recognition world-wide while supporting schools using everything from live name reading to AI synthesized audio. 

While direct B2B sales have fueled our revenue growth to date, Namecoach is uniquely positioned to tap into massive product-led growth opportunities—the hallmark of leading tech companies. Inspired by Grammarly’s immensely successful strategy, we’re starting to promote more widespread direct-to-consumer adoption through free tools like our Chrome extension, pronunciation search site, and personal Namebadges, laying the foundation for 10x revenue acceleration through freemium models. 

Our API supports a developer-led approach, akin to Twilio’s, enabling our functionality to be embedded into third-party platforms such as sales-enablement tools and learning management platforms. This drives usage-based revenue while upselling our B2B products. Additionally, our proprietary pronunciation system offers licensing opportunities for LLM and Voice AI developers, helping them humanize their AI solutions.

Namecoach is poised to scale revenue by capitalizing on key opportunities in the higher education and corporate markets, fueling growth to $10M ARR within 24 months and laying the groundwork for long-term hyper-growth.

Deep partnerships with just a handful of major tech titans being finalized now are projected to generate up to $14M in incremental ARR over 3 years.

Forward-looking financials are not guaranteed.

How Big Can Our Market Get?

As we look to the future, the question then becomes how big can this get, exactly?

Based on a detailed bottoms up analysis of current contracts and inbound demand across sectors and use cases — from universities and K-12 schools, to corporate HR, to sales / customer service and call centers, to health care settings, to recruiting and job interviews, and many more use cases — there is at least an $11B total annual revenue opportunity just in solving the name mispronunciation problem alone.  And by leveraging our unique expertise and dataset specialized for names, speech-related cultural nuance, and accents, Namecoach will add value to the rapidly growing Voice AI and Conversational AI space estimated to be a $100B opportunity by 2032.   

As we keep expanding our integrations into major communication platforms across sectors to serve more and more customers, it becomes clear that just about every communication tool can use Namecoach. 

And we are continuing to go deep on completely solving the name pronunciation problem for our customers, delivering that ever-increasing value into this ever-expanding list of communication tools across industries.  Our near-term product roadmap includes core AI-enabled features that not only create more value for our users, but set the stage for an expansion into broader pronunciation and voice AI features. 

AI Feature Roadmap. (Forward-looking statements are not guaranteed.)

And while we will continue to become ubiquitous across communication tools, our proprietary data and AI system also uniquely position us to become indispensable in the voice AI space. Name mispronunciation is turning out to be a ubiquitous pain point felt all across the rapidly emerging voice AI ecosystem, and Namecoach is perfectly positioned to solve this problem, becoming the industry-standard utility for names across voice AI infrastructure providers, model orchestrators, and every voice AI agent and tool. As voice becomes the default HCI (human-computer interface) over the next few years, Namecoach will be everywhere, behind the scenes.

Product Expansion: Beyond Names

What's even more exciting is that as we continue developing a best-in-class dataset uniquely specialized in names, cultural nuances, and accents, we are positioned to unlock massive additional opportunities created by critical gaps in more generally personalizing Voice AI and enabling more human-like, culturally aware interactions.

This strategy — of solving a single initial problem really well, and then leveraging that position to broadly expand— has been used by category-defining tech disruptors to build unicorn and decacorn companies again and again. From Grammarly expanding out from simple spelling and grammar correction to Docusign expanding out from simple contract signatures, this playbook has worked across an array of markets where something that initially appeared to be 'just a feature' turned out to be a lot more than that:

(Valuations for SaaS companies with comparable core product & GTM strategies)

Similarly, our focused entry through name pronunciation creates a scalable wedge to expand into broader personalization in communication and Voice AI solutions, making Namecoach a compelling long-term value for investors. Our placement in the workflow of human communication platforms and voice AI applications enables us to become the layer for broader context-aware personalization, cultural competency, and communication enhancement for both humans and voice AI agents.

Namecoach AI making context, culture, and identity aware communication suggestions (in development)

By leveraging our seamless integrations, AI-powered network effects, and platform ubiquity, Namecoach is positioned for a high-value exit. Potential outcomes include acquisition by major players like Salesforce, Amazon, or Microsoft, who would benefit from our proprietary data and indispensable workflow tools, or a public offering as we scale into new markets and offerings.

We Warmly Invite You to Join Our Journey

Namecoach is on a mission to revolutionize how connections are made.  Our mission is to scale the impact we’re already making globally, enabling every interaction to be smooth, personal, and warm.

We’re a team of innovators from world-renowned organizations educated at top tier institutions — and with expertise in AI, product innovation, growth strategy, and operations, we bring a proven track record scaling startups and building technology that fosters inclusive human connection.

We are dedicated to exemplifying and epitomizing the thesis that technology companies can both do good for the world and do well for our stakeholders — and this is a major reason that a strong group of leading institutional and strategic investors have now joined us on this journey:

We now invite you to join us as we build a category leader in communication enablement software with patented Voice AI algorithms, one of the most comprehensive datasets of names and pronunciations in the world, and a clear, unique vision for product expansion and scale. 

Together, we can create a future where more personal, respectful, meaningful communication is easier than ever.