Who thought that helping people pronounce names correctly could make a startup generate $4 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)? This is what Namecoach has already achieved. In a society increasingly diverse, Namecoach is using technology to open a new market.
What inspired you to take the leap and start this company?
I started Namecoach because I’ve seen how much power a name holds.
It started with something deeply personal. At my sister’s graduation, the announcer mangled her name, despite good intentions. I watched that moment meant to celebrate her journey turn into one that left her feeling invisible and my family feeling more than a bit annoyed.
When I was playing with the idea of coding up a solution, my mom mentioned that when she immigrated, her new doctor’s staff said her name was too hard to pronounce, so they called her ‘Anna’ (not even close to her name). She said it felt like they were treating someone else entirely. So she dreaded going in for appointments even more.
Later, when I was teaching at Stanford, I found myself hesitating to call on students whose names I wasn’t confident pronouncing. Not because I didn’t care, because I did. But that hesitation, and sometimes omission of the name – based on that fear of getting it wrong – can become a silent barrier to trust, learning, and opportunity. And that dynamic doesn’t end in the classroom. That same fear shows up for people in company meetings, interviews, sales calls, greeting worried patients, casual introductions – everywhere.
I’ve felt it with my own name as well. Someone would mispronounce it. I’d correct them. Then the next time, they’d say it wrong again. It usually isn’t intentional, but there’s a quiet awkwardness and disconnect in those moments. And the impact isn’t just emotional. I’ve watched a sales call go cold the moment a representative stumbled on the prospect’s name. I’ve spoken to recruiters who avoid calling candidates because they’re unsure how to say their name. I’ve been annoyed getting fundraising calls from an alma mater that start with messing up my name, instantly replacing my feeling of fond connection with alienation.
Through all this I realized something: this isn’t a soft problem – it’s foundational.
We built Namecoach to take away the guesswork, the fear, the friction and replace it with confidence and connection. It started with names, but it’s really about building a future where every interaction is imbued with recognition, care, and respect.
A great team is key in the success of a young company. What makes you believe that your team has what it takes to make Namecoach a successful business?
I’m lucky to be building Namecoach alongside some of the most talented, mission-driven people I’ve ever worked with.
Our team includes Fortune 500 veterans and startup operators who’ve scaled products to tens of millions in revenue. We’ve got leaders who’ve worked at Amazon, Coca-Cola, AOL, American Express, and who hold degrees from Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, and Columbia. We’ve built billion-dollar exits, scaled engineering orgs from 30 to 1,000, and led $28B mergers. But what really matters is that everyone here is obsessed with our shared purpose. Everyone wants to create a world where it’s easier to really connect with and respect others. And we have the track record, grit, and deep empathy to build a category-defining company that does just that.
What is your growth strategy to keep increasing revenue?
We have a ton of opportunity right now, and our growth strategy reflects this — spanning B2B expansion, product-led growth, and deep integration with major platforms — all reinforced by our proprietary AI.
We serve higher education institutions, K-12 districts, and enterprises through flexible SaaS subscriptions tailored to their needs. In 2025, one of our biggest revenue drivers is Namecoach AI for Events, which can virtually guarantee 100% name pronunciation accuracy for graduations — whether names are read by humans or synthesized with AI. This tool is quickly becoming the gold standard for proper name recognition.
A major part of our strategy centers on deep partnerships with leading tech platforms. We’re finalizing deals with top EdTech and enterprise platforms to embed Namecoach AI into their ecosystems, bringing our tools to over 30 million users. This kind of distribution creates massive viral exposure — and a projected $14M+ in potential revenue through direct revenue and customer upgrades. These integrations don’t just expand reach — they also deepen engagement and drive upsell within our existing B2B customers by embedding Namecoach more deeply into their daily workflows.
Some of these partnerships can also accelerate product-led growth through freemium tools like a Chrome extension, pronunciation search platform, and personal Namebadges. These tools seed viral adoption and open a natural upgrade path into enterprise deployments — part of a ‘virtuous cycle’ model inspired by Grammarly’s initial breakout success.
And similar to Grammarly’s expansion, we plan to keep expanding across verticals — including healthcare, recruiting, and government — where trust, personalization, and identity are mission-critical.
Finally – and perhaps what I’m most excited about – we’re also expanding through the fast-growing channel of voice AI providers, AI orchestrators, and companies embedding speech into their products and voice AI agents. Many of these teams are looking for culturally intelligent, human-centered pronunciation solutions to enhance the personalization and accuracy of their voice interfaces. Namecoach is well-positioned to serve this need with our unique dataset and API. Our technology is already being explored for integration or licensing in select applications, and we see this as a powerful way to fuel growth — and our moat — beyond traditional SaaS.
And while names are just the beginning, the same infrastructure — contextualized voice identity, pronunciation intelligence, and culturally aware interaction — can unlock broader applications in communication, hiring, customer service, and digital presence. Our long-term vision is to become the trusted layer of spoken identity and cultural fluency across the voice-enabled world.
What does the competitive landscape look like, and how do you differentiate?
There are other solutions trying to tackle name pronunciation, but none are doing it quite like us. We designed Namecoach specifically for names — a focused approach that’s allowed us to build the largest pronunciation dataset in the world, roughly five times bigger than our nearest competitor’s. Every new name we learn makes the whole system smarter.
We use a hybrid model that mixes high-quality human recordings and user-verified pronunciations with AI-generated pronunciations, and we continuously incorporate user feedback. That gives us a level of accuracy and personalization others just can’t easily match. And this scale powers a virtuous data loop: more usage leads to better accuracy and breadth, which attracts even more usage. That network effect compounds over time, making it difficult for others to catch up.
Integration has been a priority from day one as well — our solution is plug-and-play, with plug-ins being used by customers in platforms like Salesforce and Canvas, and we’re in active talks to integrate natively into other major systems.
In fact, some of the big voice AI platforms treat us as a strategic partner rather than a competitor — they’re even looking to license our pronunciation system to improve their own offerings. Unlike generic text-to-speech or voice AI platforms that are not built to handle the vast corpus of diverse names — and keep stumbling over them — our system was designed from the ground up to get names right.
On top of all that, we tick the enterprise-readiness boxes like SOC 2 and FERPA compliance, making procurement much easier for us than would-be competitors.
Put it all together, and you have a specialized, scalable, and enterprise-grade solution for getting names right that truly sets us apart in this space. While others may try to enter the space, Namecoach is already becoming the infrastructure layer for name pronunciation. We’re not building a feature — we’re defining the standard. And with our growing network of partners, integrations, and customers, that lead is only widening.
What were your major successes in 2024?
2024 was a big year for us.
We launched our Namecoach AI for Events platform, which has already started transforming how institutions handle high-stakes events like graduations. Universities can now virtually guarantee accurate, respectful name pronunciation at scale, and initial deployments have been very well-received by students, faculty, and families. We believe this will revolutionize the commencement space over the next few years, and effectively become table stakes for how these events handle personal recognition.
Another key milestone was launching a new version of our AI Pronunciation Recommendation Engine — a system that leveraged the latest in frontier AI models, our ever-expanding proprietary data pipelines, and our specialized algorithms for names. The system can personalize pronunciation based on geography, culture, and usage patterns, and it gets smarter with every interaction and forms the core of our growing AI moat. It has led to expansion contracts, as well as the biggest revenue opportunities we’ve ever had with big tech partners and customers.
We also rolled out a beta version Namecoach AI for Canvas, the world’s most widely-used learning management system. Now, AI-powered pronunciation buttons are embedded in the tools that faculty students and faculty use everyday. Using a combination of our new AI Pronunciation Recommendation system and voice transformation AI, we are able to solve long-standing needs of students in how they represent their names, and long-standing needs from faculty in learning names that students haven’t yet verified.
And most importantly, these innovations translated into revenue: we expanded contracts with existing customers by as much as 10x, proving our ability to scale within large institutions when the need is mission-critical.
What are your milestones for 2025?
2025 is all about scaling reach, expanding our AI advantage, and going global.
As I mentioned, we’re working to finalize deep partnerships with leading EdTech and enterprise platforms that will bring Namecoach AI to over 30 million users. That kind of distribution opens the door to significant viral adoption, massive revenue acceleration, and perhaps most importantly, serves as a template for creating these native integrations with every major communication platform out there.
We’ve also been invited to pilot a system-wide rollout at one of the largest higher education systems in the country. It’s a strong signal that major institutions want to make respectful naming practices a default — not an exception.
On the technology front, we’re launching a number of new AI-enabled features our users have been wanting, including a new version of our AI Phonetics Service that will open additional revenue streams across verticals, and our ‘pronunciation karaoke’ feature, which combines visual phonetic and audio elements to make it even easier to learn names.
And we’re taking our first major steps towards global scale. We’re entering the UK through a strategic partnership with JISC, the largest higher education tech consortium in the country. And we’re developing strategic partnerships with companies in the Asia-Pacific region, including 2 major EdTech providers in Australia.
All of this is expected to fuel our projected growth to over $6M in ARR this year, while continuing to strengthen our position as the trusted infrastructure for name-based identity. 2025 is our year to take everything we’ve built so far and make it more wide-reaching, more personal, and more indispensable.
