Namecoach spent a decade building the world's largest verified name-pronunciation dataset, used by 400+ organizations. Now we're building Euphonia: the layer that helps voice AI hear and say names, and other hard words, correctly.

Voice agents now take restaurant orders, book patient visits, and screen job candidates. They still break on the words that matter most. A caller says "Thanakorn," the transcript reads "ton of corn," and the agent acts on the wrong name. The big speech providers have told customers to fix pronunciation and recognition themselves, and it has become a pervasive pain point across the entire voice AI ecosystem.

That gap sits exactly where our data and expertise are. For ten years we did the unglamorous work: collecting and verifying how real people say their names, one person at a time. We didn't plan the timing. But no company is better built for this moment.

The foundation is a real business: 90%+ gross margins, and three consecutive profitable quarters funding the expansion and continuing to generate data critical to our new products.

Backed by leading investors behind Anthropic, OpenAI, Airbnb, Meta, and Oura Ring, Namecoach is building the trusted infrastructure that will power humanized connection at global scale — both for people and for AI.

With our initial set of products already adopted by top universities and Fortune 500 companies, Namecoach proves that mastering a single, overlooked, universal pain point can unlock extraordinary enterprise value.

And with strong business fundamentals, we’re already delivering practical, compounding value to millions of users. But names are just the beginning.

Our patented AI system, powered by the world’s largest verified dataset of name pronunciations, is already expanding into voice-driven communication and global AI infrastructure.

And with voice interfaces becoming the next dominant human-computer interface, Namecoach is building a critical layer in the $100B+ Voice AI and Conversational AI markets.

It’s the combination of proven product-market fit today, and the inevitable platform expansion of tomorrow, that’s bringing top retail investors into this round as we open access to our broader community.

We were honored to be featured and directly invested in by Crowdscale, a premiere outlet focused on “startup investing for the masses.” Crowdscale highlighted our exceptional gross margins, our ever-improving machine learning models, and our massive growth potential as a strong case for investment.

We’re also proud to have been named a Top Deal by Kingscrowd, a leading private markets investment research platform, following extensive diligence from their team; who subsequently made a direct investment themselves.

The Next Frontier of Enterprise Value

Where does enterprise value come from in an AI-first world? Parul Singh of Initialized Capital captured the answer precisely: not from model size or tech differentiation, but from productizing overlooked and hard-to-collect data “earned through workflow integration, patient data collection, and relentless operational grind”:

This has been part of Namecoach’s strategy from Day One.

Before AI became the dominant paradigm, we were already building the data foundation others would need. We have a high-trust, real-world personalization dataset earned through real user engagement.

As voice interfaces, personalization engines, and conversational AI systems scale, Namecoach is positioned as the trusted infrastructure layer that humanizes digital interaction.

We aren't adapting to the AI era. We were built for it.

Our Initial Problem Space is Astoundingly Widespread

These investors are betting on our growth, in part because our traction so far is just scratching the surface.

We did the research (and the math). We found that the initial problem we have been solving, helping people say names, turns out to be an astoundingly large space in itself:

There are over 30 million distinct names used around the world — vastly exceeding the vocabulary of any language. And with 80% of them having multiple valid pronunciations, it’s no surprise how often they’re said wrong.

In an increasingly diverse and connected world, mispronunciations have become a daily, universal friction point. This cuts across education, business, healthcare, and society.

From teachers to sales reps to doctors, they regularly get names wrong, often without realizing the damage done.

The consequences are immediate:

1. Trust erodes
2. Engagement drops
3. Relationships weaken
4. Opportunities vanish

When individuals’ names are repeatedly mispronounced, they experience lower confidence and diminished engagement. The effects cascade to team dynamics, learning outcomes, customer rapport, and business success.

Across industries and life stages, people internalize name mispronunciations as signals of disrespect and exclusion. This causes real harm to belonging, identity, and connection.

Mispronunciations aren’t small glitches. They are deeply consequential pain points.

This is why our initial products have gained traction.

The Initial Namecoach Solution

Namecoach's initial set of products seamlessly embed pronunciation intelligence into the daily tools people use to connect across education, business, and beyond.

We make it effortless to get names right and in doing so, we unlock trust, connection, and opportunity at every point of communication.

Our patented, award-winning AI system allows us to deliver culturally aware, confidence-inspiring pronunciation recommendations, even when a name has multiple genuine variations.

As more users engage, the system continually gets better:

1. Every user-contributed or user-verified pronunciation expands our proprietary dataset,
2. Every interaction improves our AI’s accuracy and contextual intelligence,
3. Every new integration expands our reach and strengthens our stickiness

These natural network effects create a self-reinforcing flywheel of continuously increasing accuracy, coverage, and defensibility:

More users → Better data → Smarter AI → More users

New Revenue Paths for the Existing Business

Today, we generate revenue through B2B SaaS annual subscriptions across:

1. Higher Education (colleges, universities, K-12 districts),
2. Corporate (SMB’s, Enterprise, global organizations).

But that's just the first layer, and we're expanding across multiple powerful growth vectors.

1. B2B SaaS

Namecoach is embedded into core workflows at leading organizations, driving strong gross margins and natural expansion.

2. Product-Led Growth

Inspired by strategies used by breakout companies like Grammarly, we are rapidly expanding our direct-to-user adoption channels.

Our growing suite of free tools: a Chrome extension, a Pronunciation Search platform, and Personal Namebadges allows individuals to experience the power of Namecoach effortlessly, laying the foundation for:

1. Viral organic growth,
2. Bottom-up institutional adoption,
3. Freemium-to-paid conversion

This product-led growth motion enables revenue acceleration through mass adoption and upselling.

3. API for 3rd Party Communication Tools

Our API enables third-party developers to integrate Namecoach functionality into their communication platforms from sales enablement tools to learning management systems. Our enterprise communication software unlocks usage-based revenue and embedding us deeper into digital communication ecosystems.

(Think: the Twilio of personalized communication.)

4. Voice AI Licensing

As Voice AI adoption accelerates, Namecoach’s proprietary system is uniquely positioned to become the trusted layer for fixing massive pain points in both recognition and pronunciation of names and words:

1. AI model platforms
2. Conversational AI systems
3. Voice agents

How Big Can Our Market Get?

Namecoach is already addressing a massive, overlooked market and expanding into one of the largest technology opportunities of the decade.

Through detailed bottom-up analysis of current contracts, inbound demand, and future use cases, we’ve validated that helping people with name mispronunciation alone represents an $11B+ total annual revenue opportunity across:

1. Universities and K-12 schools,
2. Corporate HR and onboarding,
3. Sales, customer service, and call centers,
4. Healthcare,
5. Recruiting,
6. And more.

And mastering this space positions us to move into the emerging Voice AI and Conversational AI markets estimated to be $100 billion+ by 2032.

We are reassessing our revenue projections as our early expansion into voice AI takes shape. We have refocused the company here deliberately, because the upside is bigger: a larger addressable market than name pronunciation alone, and the potential for faster revenue growth as voice AI adoption compounds.

Note: Forward-looking statements are not guaranteed.

Euphonia: Powering Tomorrow’s Voice AI Interfaces

Euphonia: our biggest expansion since founding

This 4th revenue expansion path mentioned above is where we are making major bets now.

Voice AI fails on hard words in two places: hearing them and saying them. Euphonia addresses both.

1. Resolve (in development) fixes names and key words that speech recognition gets wrong, before the AI acts on them.
2. Resynth (in development) makes the agent's voice say those words right, keeping the voice natural.
3. The first version of our system guides each engine's pronunciation and lifted accuracy on hard names from 66% to 87% in our April benchmark. Hear it at namecoach.ai/euphonia

One layer covers every category of word that breaks voice AI: people's names, company and product names, menu items, drug names, scientific terms, acronyms, addresses, confirmation codes, and foreign words.

The Problem in Voice AI

How often does voice AI get names and words wrong? Deepgram estimates 15 to 18% of calls are affected by pronunciation failures, at $3 to $4 of escalation cost per call. Juniper Research forecasts about 48 billion contact-center platform calls a year by 2027. If AI handles just a tenth of those, that's roughly 700 to 900 million affected calls a year, before counting recorded audio such as audiobooks, articles, and phone menus.

But despite the pervasiveness of this problem, the industry has pushed the problem onto its customers. The providers' own public guidance essentially asks their customers to fix pronunciations by hand, one by one, or to ask LLMs for phonetic guidance. That guidance is often woefully inadequate, because an LLM has little idea what text input will produce what sound in a given voice engine. This has produced a massive gap and pain point across the industry.

1. ElevenLabs, best-practices docs: "For models that don't support phoneme tags, you can try writing words more phonetically." (elevenlabs.io/docs/overview/capabilities/text-to-speech/best-practices)
2. ElevenLabs, pronunciation-dictionary docs: "You can use AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT to help generate IPA or CMU notations for specific words." (elevenlabs.io/docs/eleven-agents/customization/voice/pronunciation-dictionary)
3. Inworld AI, blog: "Not sure what phonemes to use? Ask ChatGPT or your favorite AI assistant for the IPA transcription." (inworld.ai/blog/tts-custom-pronunciation-timestamps-websockets)
4. A Deepgram team member, in their public discussions: "SSML is not on our roadmap at this time," adding that "the industry is moving away from SSML." (github.com/orgs/deepgram/discussions/1031)
5. Regal's voice-agent guide warns that putting pronunciation instructions in the agent prompt "will not work." (support.regal.ai, "How to Improve AI Voice Agent Pronunciation of Key Terms")
6. The W3C's Pronunciation Task Force: "Yet there is no way to markup content today that will correctly present TTS generated output across commonly used TTS engines and operating environments." (w3c.github.io/pronunciation/technical-approach)

Every builder of a voice agent inherits this problem. The industry sells the pieces, speech-to-text and text-to-speech. No established player sells the connecting layer that makes agents hear and say the hard words right, across systems. As voice becomes the dominant human-computer interface, we are poised to provide that missing layer across the whole ecosystem:

Why we win

A decade of verified pronunciation data gives the system a lead in accuracy nobody can shortcut: about 2 million recordings of people saying their own names, and 150,000 hand-verified phonetic labels. That is a massive head start a competitor would need years to rebuild. The layer is platform-agnostic: one adapter for any speech system, which matters more as voice models multiply (and the cost of developing them plummets) and get mixed within the same product. Use compounds the advantage, because every interaction makes our system more accurate and more efficient. The work is protected: three issued US patents, two applications pending, and a new provisional filed this year on the voice AI work. And the vision is turning to reality thanks to our new top-notch voice AI team, hired from a search that drew about 2,000 applicants.

The play is familiar in some ways: Euphonia is to voice AI pronunciation/recognition what Twilio was to messaging and Stripe to payments. It solves a hard cross-provider problem in a way that developers integrate once and forget.

Beyond Names: A Proven Playbook for Building Iconic Companies

Beyond solving a cross-provider technology problem in the way Twilio and Stripe did, Namecoach is executing another strategy that has consistently built category-defining tech companies:

Solve an overlooked problem exceptionally well, then expand into a broader, indispensable platform.

This strategy has worked across industries where what initially seemed like "just a feature" became the foundation for billion-dollar platforms.

1. Grammarly started with basic spelling and grammar checks — now it powers full written communication assistance.
2. DocuSign started with e-signatures — now it leads the entire digital agreements ecosystem.
3. Calendly started with scheduling — now it drives full meeting workflow automation.

Namecoach currently owns name pronunciation by humans. Euphonia extends that into the editing and quality layer for voice AI: making every speech-recognition and speech-synthesis system hear and say hard words right.

But the new underlying technology we're developing to achieve that also unlocks expansion into novel applications in products utilizing speech technology. Here are just three examples:

1. Hyper-targeted voice editing. Change one word, or the emotion of one phrase, in finished audio, with no re-recording session. Fix a name, a price, or a flat line read in an ad, audiobook, or dubbed video.
2. Voice Intelligence for LLMs. Tell the voice agent's language model (for example, in chained speech-to-text, LLM, text-to-speech systems) how something was said, which today's transcripts erase. Think: the caller's "great, thanks" was sarcastic, or frustration is rising.
3. Persistent cross-platform lexicons. Let any business teach the system once that its "Houston" sandwich is said "HOW-stun," so every agent hears it and says it right from then on.

And other important adjacent opportunities can follow as well, such as personalized, culturally intelligent communication for humans and AI.

For example, we can expand into:

1. Culturally intelligent prompts (e.g., holiday and etiquette awareness),
2. Speech personalization (accents, dialects, cultural variation),
3. Context and identity aware enhancements for voice agents and human communication.

Each new step creates a powerful and defensible flywheel. Each expansion strengthens our data advantage, platform integrations, and user network effects. And in this way, a niche we own turns into a much larger play.

An Indispensable Utility

Namecoach will become critical infrastructure across multiple domains. As voice-driven and AI-first interfaces become the norm across customer support, sales enablement, healthcare, education, enterprise workflows, and countless other industries solutions, Namecoach is positioned to become the indispensable utility powering things like:

1. AI customer support agents that hear and pronounce names correctly,
2. Sales enablement tools that adapt to client cultural expectations,
3. Enterprise voicebots that build trust, not friction
4. Healthtech voice interfaces that hear and pronounce critical medical terms correctly.

Owning this critical layer positions for multiple high-value outcomes, including:

1. Acquisition by strategic platforms across Enterprise Communication and Voice AI categories such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, Amazon, Microsoft, or others seeking proprietary solutions for ubiquitous speech technology problems their customers face.
2. Public offering as we expand into new markets and scale platform ubiquity.

Our model, momentum, and data advantage give us the flexibility to pursue the path that creates the most enduring impact and the greatest value for shareholders.

We Warmly Invite You to Join Our Journey

Namecoach is on a mission to revolutionize how connections are made. We are scaling our impact globally and enabling every human and AI interaction to be smoother, more personal, and more culturally aware.

We are a team of innovators from world-renowned organizations, educated at top-tier institutions, and with deep expertise across AI, product innovation, growth strategy, and operations. Our team brings a proven track record of scaling startups and building technology that fosters inclusive human connection.

We are dedicated to proving that technology companies can both do good for the world, and do well for our stakeholders.

This mission is why a powerful group of leading institutional and strategic investors have already joined us on this journey:

Now, we invite you to join us — as we build the category leader for respectful, personalized, high-quality AI-enabled communication worldwide. Together, we can create a future where every connection feels more human, more meaningful, and more trusted.

Be part of our mission to humanize technology, at a global scale.