Praveen Shanbhag, founder and CEO of pronunciation tool Namecoach, joined Cheddar News to discuss his company's latest funding and what lies ahead as it integrates with other well-known platforms.

Pronunciation Tool Namecoach Aims to Make Its System Forefront of Office Inclusivity

name pronunciation platform name coach raising eight million in a series a round led by Impact America Fund Name coach says it's developed the world's biggest database of professionally recorded accurate audio name pronunciations? Well, the company uses an algorithm based name recommendation model to suggest the correct pronunciation for any name or person. And joining me now is Praveen sean bug a founder and ceo of name Coach Praveen thank you so much for coming on the show. This is such a crucial technology. How does it work? Well, first, thanks so much for having me. Kristen really appreciate being here. Uh, so what name coach does is we have a system that embeds accurate audio pronunciations and actually soon we have a system for phonetic spellings of names that are both accurate and intuitive for humans to actually read and understand. We put that all into the tools that people are using every day in the workplace to help people create more inclusive work environments and systems like Crm like Salesforce, uh, to interact with external constituents, you know, customers and prospects, learning management systems, class rosters. Uh, the list goes on that ultimately just makes it super easy for people to have at their fingertips these these name pronunciations and I remember how to say them when they're about to interact with someone. It is such a connection point. Right? I mean, I can only speak to my experience the business that I work in. I know my producers would say the same thing and this would serve us very well because you want to make a good first impression and you want to have an inclusive conversation Praveen. You've just raised new money. How are you gonna use that to expand? Yeah. So, uh, we have three main things that we're deploying. The capital for the first is of course sales and marketing to both close some of the inbound opportunity that we've got kind of exploded over the past couple of years, um, and also generate new demand for what we're doing and what we now see as a market really primed for our solution. Um second, and potentially more interesting is rapidly expanding the integration sets that we have. So, you know, as I mentioned, we're integrating into lots of different platforms. Um, we want to do this both to maximize the value, we deliver to our users and customers because they want these uh, these buttons kind of in their in their tools that they're using instinct across those tools, but also to start serving new segments um that we've seen interest from, including healthcare, unified communications service systems, call centers, things like that. Um, and then third, we have an Ai technology roadmap. Um, and basically we have a lot of models that we built or in development now That allow us to uh you mentioned, you know, providing the right pronunciation, given that a lot of, a lot of, a lot of names, over 80% of names have multiple valid pronunciation. You want to be able to provide the right one, but also a number of other um a number of other systems that fully solve the name pronunciation problem as well as lay the groundwork for what I see as sort of the next steps with the company which is two more generally provide prompts and feedback to users to help with their voice conversations to help create warmer connections with others and to create connections with others that really respect. There were taken to account their identity and who they are even beyond names. So yeah, beyond names. That was gonna be my next question. Praveen. I mean obviously this works with names and that connection is so important you and I know that well, but for any word out there, I think that probably this would serve a very valid purpose as well. Does it go beyond just names? Hard words to say words that might be new to some people. Can this work for those? Absolutely. In fact, we've started with some of our current customers, we've started helping with uh sort of in the one example in the high end high touch customer service space helping with the names of wine. The names of difficult to pronounce foods. Um we also have a healthcare partner that wants us to help with the names of pharmaceuticals, drugs, you know, latin words, things like that. So yes, pronunciation kind of writ large is certainly something that we can and are helping with and with a few of our customers and thinking about expanding that out in the future. Um you know, even even kind of separate from the broader sort of, how do we help people make sure that their voice conversations, the voice interactions, what they're speaking is is really the best it can be. So what's the business model? I'm sure obviously you need to make money for being to grow the business in addition to the VC funding. Is it a subscription model or how do you plan to generate revenue? Yeah. So we are revenue generating right now. It's a sad subscription model. We have over 350 customers that are um that are subscribed to our service at the moment. Alright. Praveen, Sean boggs founder and Ceo of Name Coach Praveen, I like what you're doing and thanks again for coming on the show.