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NAME PRONUNCIATION BLUNDER 

Praveen’s foot tapped to the cadence by which the names were being called. There were only four left before they got to his sister’s.

He placed the pamphlet on the seat next to him in anticipation, getting ready to applaud his sister’s looming accomplishment.

The moment came, and instead of jubilation, Praveen winced. They had butchered the pronunciation of her name.

This wasn’t a casual moment at the Starbucks line. Praveen’s sister was grabbing her diploma, not a Shaken Espresso.

It was the culmination of 4 hard-working years to achieve something that brought great pride to their family, many of whom had flown in for the ceremony.

It was this moment that yanked Praveen off his career path and into the gritty world of building a startup.

CODING THE SOLUTION

I spoke with Praveen and he’s somewhat an antithesis of the typical startup founder that Silicon Valley romanticizes.

You often hear about the college dropouts that go on to become iconic startup founders - Michael Dell, Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs.

Praveen is way over on the other side, this man is out here collecting the infinity stones of education: undergrad at Harvard, then an assortment of masters & PhDs at Stanford, Columbia, and Cambridge.

His studies centered around philosophy which intrigued me as I’m always interested by founders from unique backgrounds.

When asked if his learnings in philosophy come in handy during his founder journey he remarked that it programs him to question everyone’s assumptions, including his own. This makes a ton of sense - to build something great, you have to tear down the generally accepted conventions that society already operates on.

In this instance, the accepted convention was that it’s just a fact of life that people would mispronounce names - society had accepted this as the norm.

But galvanized by the mispronunciation of his sister’s name in a key moment, Praveen set out to challenge this norm with a solution.

NAMECOACH IS BORN

Praveen built an app from his laptop to collect recordings of students saying their names for their upcoming graduation. Positive responses poured in, prompting Praveen to scale up his ambition into something grander.

The initial app laid the framework for his company: Namecoach.

In today’s form, Namecoach blends contextual data — such as nationality, location, and prior verified pronunciations — into its AI model to predict the pronunciation of any given name.

This is much harder than it seems on the surface - Praveen estimates that 80% of names have multiple pronunciations. 

Take the example below, for someone with the name ‘Andrea’ it could very well be pronounced one of two ways:

• ANN-dree-uh

• AHN-dray-uh

Getting it right requires context, like understanding the nationality & location of the person. Praveen’s model also improves over time with each usage, and right now he has a major headstart being the first mover in the space.

WHY DOES NAME PRONUNCIATION MATTER?

I’ve got a simple name myself: Kevin

If you’re like me, you probably don’t think about name mispronunciation all that much. But for my readers with more complex names, I know that they immediately understand it’s a problem.

However I think we can expand the aperture of this dilemma and look at it as an opportunity.

There’s the famous line in Dale Carnegie’s book How To Win Friends & Influence People (which is still widely read to this day so you know it’s got the good stuff). It goes:

“Remember that a person's name is to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language”

Translation: people loving hearing the sound of their own name.

Top salespeople use their prospects’ names 4.1x per hour and have a 14% higher close rate. Getting someone’s name right and using it can quite literally have financial benefits.

Once you look at it that way, it opens up a whole treasure trove of opportunity. You tell me which tool your company is going to opt for:

• Tool that helps avoid mispronunciations of names (kinda nice I guess?)

• Tool that helps close deals & increase revenue (I need this now.)

Businesses exist to make money, and understanding that Namecoach can be utilized to drive that outcome is an important framing to understand why businesses would pay for it.

And Namecoach is integrated with Salesforce so salespeople can hear the proper pronunciation before heading into a meeting with a prospective client.

Namecoach doesn’t stop there - they’ve developed an API to seamlessly plug into businesses’ existing software. It’s part of their ongoing strategy to develop a moat that protects others from replicating their product.

STANDING UP TO THE COMPETITION

My largest concern with Namecoach is that companies that already have massive distribution roll out name pronunciation tools as a feature in their own product.

I passed on a startup named Sembly AI for this very reason - the company had built an AI tool that would transcribe & summarize virtual meetings. My fear was that Google & Zoom would roll out their own version of this and render the tool useless (which Google and Zoom have now done).

I believe that Namecoach has a few things going for it that can help fend off the larger players from dominating this space.

REASON #1: FRAGMENTATION OF THE MARKET

First, its product operates in a highly fragmented eco-system. This is contrast to video conference software where 88% of the global market share is cornered by just two platforms.

Namecoach has application use in corporate comms, CRM, call centers, social platforms, and healthcare.

LinkedIn has actually allowed users to add a verbal pronunciation of their name to their profile.

But there’s no way for a call center to seamlessly use this solution. You could manually scrape it from LinkedIn, but you’re relying on their person having set this up + you’re now adding inefficiency to the process by having to manually look up their account.

LinkedIn would also never give away this information via an API - last year they made $14.9B dollars in revenue, the name pronunciation market is simply too small for them to care.

So if you want a solution that works with you’re software, Namecoach is really the only game in town.

REASON #2: AN EVER-IMPROVING MODEL

Namecoach’s growing database and real-time corrections create a network effect — the more it’s used, the more accurate it becomes, making it increasingly hard for a competitor to catch up.

On the B2B side with platforms like Salesforce, users can mark the accuracy of each suggestion.

And with their education clients (mainly universities), business clients, and free Namebadge product, users can verify suggested pronunciations or provide pronunciations themselves.

This combines into millions of data points, micro-corrections to the model that allows Namecoach to maintain its status as the most accurate solution on the market

Namecoach has a first-mover advantage here, and its not certain that other entrants (like LinkedIn) will rely on anything other than user-provided information.

MAKE SURE YOU PRONOUNCE THE ‘R’ IN REVENUE

I have to admit, when I first saw Namecoach I was window shopping startups on Wefunder. And I thought to myself, ‘name pronunciation, that’s a cute little feature. probably pre-revenue or making a few thousand dollars’.

Not even close.

Namecoach has over $4M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) from 400+ clients.

And many of these clients are ones that most startups would kill to display their logo on their website. The WNBA. Proctor & Gamble. The American Medical Association. Ohio State University.

THE SWEET SOUND OF 90%+ MARGINS 

Namecoach has one of the highest profit margins of all the businesses I’ve analyzed.

Profit margin is simply: (Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold) / Revenue.

For Namecoach, they don’t have much incremental cost for each person’s usage of the product - the software is already built.

The main COGS in this business are infrastructure costs related to the hosting the software and transmitting the data.

Despite this being a small percentage of revenue, I’ve been really pleased to see that Namecoach has a track record of decreasing COGS, even as revenues increase.

From 2022 to 2023, Namecoach improved profit margin from 75% → 89%

While we don’t have all the details on 2025 financials, Namecoach is now operating at 90%+ profit margin - indicating further enhancements.

It’s so easy to get shiny-object syndrome and focus solely on revenue. But a dollar saved in COGS is no different than a dollar generated in revenue.

Seeing Namecoach improve their profit margin is a measure of operational excellence that I will not be overlooking in my analysis.

OVERALL PROFITABILITY

Now, once you add in everyone’s salary, marketing costs, yada yada yada….Namecoach isn’t profitable, yet.

From talking to Praveen, they’re getting really close.

Monthly cash burn has been cut to $20k, a far cry from the $323k monthly burn the company underwent just two years ago.

The difference between many founders and Praveen is that he’s been able to take the medicine. Difficult decisions, including reducing the company’s workforce & cutting back marketing spend were made to get the company to where it is today.

And now, Praveen is confident that by the end of Q3 Namecoach will be fully profitable.

POTENTIAL PRONUNCIATION GOLDMINE

I have yet to bring up what might be the most exciting thing about this company.

Beyond just human interactions, Namecoach’s technology could become critical for AI-driven voice applications — where mispronouncing a name would kill user trust instantly.

Based on the pace of advancement in AI, it’s becoming clear to me that AI Voice will be huge in 2-3 years. As this is a vocal medium, pronunciation is obviously a very critical component.

My multi-year vision of AI Voice is even too long for what Praveen is seeing on the ground today.

He spoke at an AI conference last week, and was immediately approached by 3 prospective customers afterwards.

One of those people was a founder that shared how users were ditching a competitor’s AI Voice application for theirs solely on the basis that the competitor kept pronouncing their names incorrectly.

However, the founder hadn’t really fixed the problem on their own product. They had only programmed a workaround where the AI Voice would simply not mention the user’s name if they weren’t certain on the pronunciation.

The founder wasn’t able to build anything more advanced than that (which also demonstrates how difficult it is to adequately replicate Namecoach).

Namecoach was exactly the solution they needed. I imagine a scenario where all AI Voice applications need Namecoach, and pay a licensing fee to use their technology.

SUMMARY: WILL I INVEST?

I approached this one skeptically and was pleasantly surprised at how much I ended up liking this opportunity.

What I like about this investment:

• Proven Product Need - traction is pretty clear with $4M in ARR from 400+ clients

• Ubiquitous - Namecoach is platform-agnostic, which makes them easily usable regardless of your software stack

• Diverse Client Base - From universities to the WNBA, they’re not overly reliant on one type of client

• Profit Margins - 90% profit margins will give them a lot of operational flexibility

• Massive Growth Potential - aside from growing further with their typical clients, AI Voice presents a massive opportunity that they are well-positioned to claim

• Improving Profitability - Going from a monthly burn of $323k to $20k is extremely impressive and signals looming profitability.

• Lack of Competition - Sure LinkedIn now allows users to upload their voice pronunciation, but there’s no cross-platform competitor that predicts name pronunciation

• VC Backing - Namecoach is backed by Peter Thiel’s Founder Fund, Stanford’s StartX, and other VCs. It gives credibility to everything they do and opens doors for the company.

What I don’t love about this investment:

• The Valuation - the pre-money valuation comes in at $36.98M. If they’re doing ~$4M in ARR, that would indicate investors are paying 9x revenue. That’s on the high end for SAAS startups, which typically operate in the 5-10x range. But if you want high-quality AI startups, you got to pay AI startup prices. With how close they are to profitability, it also seems more reasonable to grant a premium on the price.

• DEI Exposure - Namecoach doesn’t really have any DEI language in their current website/raise materials, but that wasn’t always the case. Their 2022 funding press release put DEI in the title (Namecoach Lands $8 Million Series A to Advance DEI and End Name Butchering in the Workplace). It’s unclear how far the anti-DEI movement will go, but there is a risk that this tool gets categorized as a DEI expense - and if that budget gets scrapped they could lose some customers. Again, I don’t really see how people could have an issue with pronouncing people’s names correctly so I’m not really factoring this in much.

• Threat of Competition - If every single person makes a LinkedIn account and uploads their name pronunciation, Namecoach will be in trouble. But that’s not going to happen, and it won’t seamlessly integrate into the tools that businesses use (Salesforce, Outlook, etc.). Still, there’s risk of adverse headwinds if the larger players like Salesforce/Outlook/etc. roll out their own name pronunciation tools.

One other thing I want to mention is that from talking to Praveen it became apparent that he is one of the most well-rounded founders I’ve talked to.

From his education path, it’s clear that he’s an intellectual and likes to think deeply about topics. Listening to him explain the thought-process to cut burn and refocus the company gave me insight into his operational prowess. And then there’s the fact that he was the one that coded v1 of the product, so he’s also got technical expertise.

Ultimately, there’s too much good stuff going on here to pass up this opportunity.

To me this is a small bet on their current operation, and a huge swing on the evolution of Voice AI. I’m buckling in for the ride, and joining my very very close friend Peter Thiel as an investor.

This is not sponsored, but if you want to check out Namecoach’s raise page to get more details, I’ve linked it below!