Avarra has raised $8 million in funding and it is launching its first AI-avatar-based enterprise application that uses AI avatars to train human salespeople.
Lightspeed Venture Partners, which is one of our sponsors at our upcoming GamesBeat Next 2024 event in San Francisco on October 28-29 (use this code, gbdean25 for 25% off), lead the round.
San Mateo, California-based Avarra CEO David Knight said in an interview with me that this knowledgeable sales AI trainer can solve the intractable, decades-old problem of effectively training and ramping up sales professionals. He showed me a demo. While the avatar’s lips and face didn’t move like a humans, the AI character was able to hold an extended conversation with a human sales trainee and then evaluate the trainee’s answers during a free-flowing conversation.
Avarra’s simulation platform leverages large-language models (LLMs) and 3D-avatars to accurately simulate actual customer sales meetings. This enables sales professionals to virtually get the experience (“at-bats”) and in-depth coaching needed to be productive in weeks instead of quarters – without sacrificing valuable prospects, Knight said.
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Other investors include GTM Fund, Firsthand Alliance and industry leaders including John W. Thompson.
“Advances in LLMs and 3D avatars are enabling an entirely new class of enterprise applications,” said Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed, in a statement. “In a world of AI-hype, Avarra is delivering a game-changing solution that can be immediately deployed to sales teams to solve a previously intractable multi-billion dollar problem and make an immediate business impact for enterprise companies. And this is just the first version of the product, there are so many more applications for this technology from coaching to interviewing to come.”
Despite spending billions of dollars annually on sales enablement, it typically takes multiple quarters for new professionals to become productive or learn how to sell new products. This is because existing sales enablement and training approaches focus on giving reps, sales engineers and other sales professionals knowledge, but what they really need is experience.
Avarra delivers realistic 3D AI-avatars trained from web-meeting transcripts and best practice playbooks that accurately simulate customer sales calls. Reps simply join a Zoom meeting and can interact as if speaking to a real customer or prospect.
The Avarra avatar sales coach then provides feedback based on the customer’s sales methodology and best practices. This gives sales professionals a safe and effective place to get the “at-bats” they need to truly be productive–dramatically cutting the time and cost of ramping up new hires, launching new products and rolling out best practices.
“Everywhere simulation has been implemented it has revolutionized entire industries by dramatically shortening cycle times and lowering costs,” said Knight. “The convergence of LLMs and 3D-avatars is for the first time bringing the power of simulation to complex people-to-people processes such as enterprise selling. Companies who adopt Avarra simulations can dramatically cut the time to ramp new hires or launch new products, accelerating market share gains and improving customer satisfaction.”
“We’re using Avarra to roll out a new pitch and demo script to our entire sales organization and it’s a real game-changer,” said Kyle Norton, chief revenue officer of Owner.com, in a statement. “I strongly believe great coaching is built around deep practice, and that repeated isolation drills are needed to learn and retain any new skill. With Avarra our reps are able to gain realistic experiences in a fraction of the time it used to take, and since it’s a simulation they are learning with virtual customers instead of sacrificing valuable prospects.”
Founded in 2023, Avarra is an enterprise avatar and AI-simulation company. Its first application delivers realistic 3D AI-avatars trained from web-meeting transcripts and best practice playbooks that accurately simulate customer sales calls.
Knight, a 30-year industry veteran, said that the company uses the convergence of 3D avatars, large language models that can be used to fuel AI character conversations, and the ability to simulate customers so that sales professional can practice their pitches.
It can be used to train a new sales rep through ever-changing conversations — and then rate the performance for immediate feedback . Of course, those people who actually train salespeople can argue this will put them out of work. But Knight can also say that there just aren’t enough of these seasoned people to keep up with the demand for training new people.
“The avatars have a realistic look, but more important than the realistic look is the realistic interactions,” Knight said. “This isn’t scripted. It’s all real time, where the responses from the avatars are generated from the underlying large language models based on what you say, creating a true, natural interactive environment, which is the real breakthrough here.”
For this to work in an experiential learning way, it has to be a natural conversation, not a scripted experience, between the AI and the human. If you send a green sales rep out to meet a real human sales prospect, they could screw it up and your company could lose a real sale. But this is a simulation, and so there’s no harm if the new recruit fails. And since you can create a wide variety of customer personae, you could test an infinite number of sales pitches in natural conversations.
“You could have the combative customer, the quiet customer, or the very confused customer,” Knight said. “And it’s really fun talking to them because it’s a natural conversation. They know a lot about themselves, their company, their own objectives. So if you don’t drive the meeting, they’ll come out and go drive the meeting. And each one of them is diffeerent.”
The demo
In the demo, Knight’s cofounder Matt played a new recruit talking to a new Avarra customer — a chief revenue officer. There are about a 100 different avatar characters so far. In this conversation, Matt tried to talk the customer into buying the company’s services. The customer asked about things like data security, and Matt tried to do his best answering. The AI customer said he was not ready to commit yet. then it closed the meeting. And then the evaluation started. You can interact with a coach who can tell you what you did wrong as well as what you did right.
I didn’t get to see it in my demo, but Knight said the company can show an avatar’s emotions. Like if you get an answer wrong, the avatar can frown at you.
“We build an entirely separate AI that just keeps track of the what the avatar is expecting in their mood, and that then drives the emotions,” he said.
The voice sounded fairly robotic, and so there is room for improvement there. And delays in interaction are now pretty similar to actual delays in real human speech. The company has about 20 people.
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