Avarra exits stealth, announces $8M seed funding and general availability of industry's first AI-avatar-based enterprise application

Funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners will enable company to scale quickly to meet customer demand

SAN MATEO, Calif., Oct. 3, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Avarra, announced an $8 million seed round of funding and general availability of the industry's first fully interactive, AI-avatar based enterprise application. The first iteration of this game-changing application solves the intractable, decades-old problem of effectively training and ramping up sales professionals. Avarra's powerful 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.

The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from 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 Venture Partners. "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 David Knight, co-founder and CEO of Avarra. "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. "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."

About Avarra

Founded in 2023, Avarra is an enterprise avatar and AI-simulation company headquartered in San Mateo, CA. Its first application delivers realistic 3D AI-avatars trained from web-meeting transcripts and best practice playbooks that accurately simulate customer sales calls. Sales professionals simply join a Zoom meeting and can interact as if speaking to a real customer or prospect. 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 new hires, launching new products and rolling out best practices. To learn more about Avarra, please visit www.avarra.ai

About Lightspeed

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise, Consumer, Health, and Fintech sectors. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 500 companies globally including Affirm, Carta, Cato Networks, Epic Games, Faire, Forty Seven, Guardant Health, Mulesoft, Navan, Netskope, Nutanix, Rubrik, Sharechat, Snap, Udaan, Ultima Genomics and more. Lightspeed and its global team currently manage $25B in AUM across the Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in the U.S., Europe, India, Israel, and Southeast Asia. www.lsvp.com

About GTMFund

GTMFund is an early stage venture capital firm backed by 300+ of the best C-Suite/VP level operators in tech. Our network of Operator LPs have been there, done that at some of the fastest growing SaaS companies - Salesforce, Okta, Tableau, Mulesoft, Procore, Snowflake, Segment, ServiceNow, Rippling, and many more. GTMfund is more than capital. We have a flywheel of resources like community and media to support our portfolio companies, grow revenue, hire, and build distribution. We help you get from zero to IPO. www.gtmfund.com

About Firsthand Capital

Firsthand Alliance is the "Salesforce mafia" VC fund. We invest in ambitious founders who are building the future of business software from the earliest stage. www.firsthand.vc

SOURCE Avarra