Namecoach Investment Memo

By: 640 Oxford, early-stage venture fund. Investing $400,000 in this round.

Why are we excited?

Namecoach embeds accurate audio pronunciation in communication tools people use everyday and before every speaking interaction.

We were immediately intrigued by the non-obvious nature of the problem Namecoach is solving - name mispronunciation. We saw the potential to create an entirely new category of communication enablement software.

Namecoach brilliantly built their AI-technology around name pronunciation because of its ubiquity (everybody has a name) and the ability to use that as a product wedge to eventually expand into more comprehensive communication and Voice AI services. With the permanent adoption of virtual communication - Ex: Zoom, Teams - the ability to form genuine connections is increasingly difficult.

Simple communicative acts like name pronunciation can help foster that personal bond and increase effective communication. And with the rapid acceleration of AI agents and Voice AI as the new HCI frontier, there is a massive opportunity not only to teach these systems how to say names, but to fill broader critical gaps in interacting with end users in accordance with their personal background and context - Ex: enabling localized greetings and interactions which are culturally and linguistically dependent on geography or customer background.

Ultimately, Namecoach will be the technology layer that enables both humans and AI to know who you are and speak to you accordingly with care and confidence. Their vision is to become a ubiquitous module in every major communication tool, driving emotionally intelligent and culturally fluent interactions across many contexts and use-cases.

How does Namecoach’s technology work?

Namecoach audio pronunciations are either drawn from its ‘general pronunciation database’ of accurate professionally-recorded pronunciations (the world’s largest such database), or verified/recorded by a user (e.g., when a student enrolls at a university or an employee joins a company).

The recommendation AI models uses data elements such as demographic information about a person whose name a user wants to pronounce, and frequency data on how often a name is pronounced one way rather than another, to decide which of multiple pronunciation variations is likely to be correct for that person. For example, a ‘Saurabh’ in the US may likely pronounce their name differently than a ‘Saurabh’ in India. These recommendations are presented to the end user in a Salesforce lead or contact view. User interaction with the recommendations (e.g., saving the correct pronunciation for a particular person among the pronunciations Namecoach has provided) both verifies the pronunciation for that particular person across any system in which they might appear and, importantly, provides data to continuously train and improve the AI recommendation models.

This value driver enjoys an inherent data network effect: as the customer and user base grows, the additional data into the system means that the breadth and accuracy of the whole system grows exponentially. While this data is currently related to their core initial value proposition around name pronunciation, they can expand the user interaction and data curation to broader elements of cultural and linguistic awareness in both human and Voice AI interactions.

Namecoach's Broad Customer Base

The diverse set of customers evidences that Namecoach’s tool is applicable across any industry. Whether you’re speaking to a patient, client, or a student - name pronunciation is always the first communicative connection. Usually when SaaS products are sold, even across different industries, the purchasing decision falls to one specific department within a company - ex: HR. Namecoach is unique because it can be sold to HR, customer success, patient experience, engineering, etc..

Below are examples of existing Namecoach customers:

● Stanford University (education) - improve student engagement

● Travelers Insurance (enterprise) - retain and engage employees

● NetJets (travel) - make customers happy

With every name pronunciation input, Namecoach takes one step closer to building a data flywheel and moat through these expanding proprietary pipelines of user-verified pronunciations. This allows for upselling additional conversational recommendations based on identity data and dynamic speech coaching.

Product Roadmap

Namecoach will be doubling-down on building out related AI models that expand the utility of their name pronunciation technology:

Automatic phonetic transcriptions. An AI system providing automated phonetic spellings of names, easily understandable by humans. NetJets is already using v1 of this technology. These phonetics will both supplement audio to make it easier to learn and remember a name, and will be useful in areas where visual cues are more easily accessible than audio. For example, inbound call center use cases.

Next Gen AI Pronunciation Recommendations. New use cases include enhanced pronunciation for existing and emerging Voice AI systems (Siri, Google Voice, AWS Polly, ElevenLabs, etc) and specific customers/platforms (e.g., telehealth platforms mangling patient names by the IVR system)

Phonology mapping (Speaker-Specific Pronunciation Guidance). Enables the next level of value from Namecoach’s audio recommendations, where pronunciations are also tailored to users consuming the audio, not just how the target pronounces their name. For example, Namecoach might recommend a different audio to a Spanish speaker than to an English speaker. This is based on state of the art onomastics/linguistics/sociology research, in addition to their own user interaction data and research.

Namecoach AI for Events

New platform for graduation and other events that virtually guarantees 100% accuracy in name pronunciation at graduation ceremonies, setting the new standard for name recognition world-wide while supporting schools in using everything from live name reading to AI synthesized audio. Leverages a range of AI-based features to increase accuracy and efficiency across a range of customer needs, including synthetic AI voices, voice cloning, and AI-based pronunciation guidance.

Expanding into the Broader Conversational and Voice AI Space

The product roadmap below provides insight into one way that Namecoach’s name pronunciation technology can serve as the foundation for building conversational prompts and eventually comprehensive speech guidance for humans, which can be used to enhance voice AI agents as well.

Traction

Namecoach’s metrics are incredibly strong and provide strong signals of product-market fit:

$4M+ ARR FY’24

90%+ Gross Margin

$30K Enterprise ACV

If we can make the amount of time we spend communicating just 1% more effective for everybody, the impact is in the trillions, not the billions. - Max Lytvyn, CEO of Grammarly

Founder

Dr. Praveen Shanbhag, Founder & CEO, built Namecoach after seeing the effect name mispronunciation can have on people. While getting his PhD at Stanford, he was inspired to build the initial version of the product after his sister’s name was mangled at her college graduation. He first approached various universities to use the product to pronounce students’ names correctly at graduation. We spoke to the IT Department at the Univ. of Michigan and they said students have called them with tears in their eyes because nobody had ever gotten their name right, and now they did.

Investment Opportunity

Namecoach is raising on a priced round at a $37M pre money valuation, with an indicative share price of $1.1137. An investment means betting that Namecoach will be worth well beyond that in the future — and considering their traction ($4M+ ARR, 90%+ gross margins) and vision to power the voice of both humans and AI, it’s a good bet. Namecoach is building the pronunciation layer of communication tools everywhere and turning a daily friction into a billion dollar opportunity.

About 640 Oxford

640 Oxford is a pre-seed and seed stage venture fund writing $250K–$400K checks. We’re former operators helping founders go from zero to one, investing alongside other top firms. Sector-agnostic and founder-first, we back experts with bold ideas early in their journey — and stay in their corner for the long haul. Fore more information visit 640oxford.com.