It’s really hard to close a sale. That’s why more than 50% of sales reps miss their quotas, according to Forbes. The problem is traditional sales training is inadequate — in fact, a survey by Training Industry showed that one in four sales reps believes their training is ineffective.

Traditional training just can’t provide what sales reps actually need: real-time, personalized, on-the-call coaching.

What if you knew exactly what your prospects and customers were feeling? What if every member of your team could read the emotional and conversational cues of the client like a book? That’s why we’re building ChipBrain.

Effective communicators close more deals. Our emotionally intelligent AI assistant aims to support sales professionals by providing real-time feedback on the emotional response of the client to their messaging, pinpointing key turning points in the conversation when they were particularly effective or ineffective. Over time, our adaptive intelligence platform may allow us to deliver tailored recommendations specific to the client, the company, and the representative.

We believe that artificial intelligence can teach people to be more emotionally intelligent, more persuasive, and ultimately more effective in conversation and negotiation. We imagine a world in which our AI can help any human in any company—in any market—sell anything.

ChipBrain empowers sales teams to become better communicators. Our technology may enable users to:

• Receive emotional analysis and forecasting
• Identify key turning points in conversations - phrases that lead to successful closing, upselling, and rapport-building with customers
• Predict the likelihood of success throughout the conversation
• Improve soft skills communications training and learn from your top performers - ChipBrain identifies the best response in a situation and propagates that knowledge to the rest of your team, automatically. 
• Easily view customer insights in a central dashboard
• Get personalized feedback - reveal key turning points in sales calls: a subtle shift in the client’s tone of voice or an approving head nod.

Our product plans to combine supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques to provide real-time emotion, tone, and facial expression feedback in live conversations across all modalities of digital communication: text, voice, and video—taking the guesswork out of identifying conversational cues, and enabling sales professionals to see at a glance how they are coming across to customers. Our AI assistant also plans to leverage information about the unique strengths and weaknesses of the individual salesperson to make suggestions about what to say, when to say it, and how to say it in order to close a deal.

Our product plans to supply performance reports for each salesperson, including comparisons of their performance to optimal benchmarks set by learning from top performers and specific examples of their previous text, speech, or expressions that led to customer conversion.

ChipBrain’s product comes at a time when more sales teams are going virtual and embracing AI in an already robust sales software market. In fact, MarketsandMarkets Research predicts that the $1.1 billion sales enablement software market may grow at an almost 20% CAGR over the next four years. At the same time, McKinsey estimates that AI technology could generate an additional $2.6 trillion in revenues.

Meanwhile, the use of digital communication in sales has steadily increased, according to Salesforce, with 60% of sales reps reporting that they’ve increased the amount of time spent virtually connecting with customers.

ChipBrain is a B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. The company distributes its product as a standalone product and as an add-on to existing CRMs via key partnerships.

We plan to generate revenues through the following avenues:

• Negotiating custom contracts with new customers
• Self-serve subscription model

While entire industries are being transformed by artificial intelligence, the sales profession—which largely relies on intuition, personality, and generalized best practices—remains insulated. ChipBrain’s team is prepared and well-equipped to integrate AI into the sales industry.

ChipBrain is led by MIT, Harvard and London School of Economics graduates, highly experienced in artificial intelligence, software engineering, and sales management.

Lisa Vo

Founder

Lisa Vo holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Harvard University, with software engineering experience from Microsoft and Palantir Technologies. She created and led a new computer science course while at Harvard, co-founded and led engineering at Bluebonnet Data--a national tech nonprofit with over 200 technical volunteers, and brought to market a political tech startup as co-founder and CTO. Lisa is a first-generation immigrant from Vietnam.

Curtis Northcutt

Founder

Curtis Northcutt was born and raised in a rural area between Lexington and Athens, Kentucky. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather worked as mailmen and his mother worked minimum-wage jobs. After graduating valedictorian of Vanderbilt's College of Engineering in 2013, Curtis attended MIT, where he created a cheating detection system used by MITx and HarvardX MicroMasters courses and was awarded the MIT Masters Thesis Award (2017). His PhD at MIT (2017-2021) focuses on AI algorithms to augment human intelligence. Curtis invented confident learning and the Python package 'cleanlab' for weak supervision and finding label errors in datasets. He has a decade of experience in AI and industry, including work with research groups at Google, Oculus, Facebook AI Research, Amazon, Microsoft Research, NASA, MIT, and Harvard, as well as prior startup experience as Chief AI Scientist with Knowledge AI.

John Fanning

Founder/Advisor

John Fanning is the former CEO and founding chairman of Napster, with over 30 years of experience leading and investing in top technology companies. He has introduced such internet innovations as client-server gameplay, voice over IP, and auto-upgrading and authentication. He has founded numerous successful ventures, including NetGames, NetMovies, and Netcapital.

Pat Cahill

President

With over thirty years experience in sales and sales training, Pat Cahill is a Managing Director at the MAC Venture Group. His primary focus is training and developing sales teams, implementing appropriate managerial tools to track and monitor progress, and instilling the discipline necessary to create a scalable and successful sales and marketing program. Previously, he was the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at IntelliSpace, where he took the company from startup phase to an annual revenue of $66M. He also led Sales and New Business Development for seven years at Don Aux Associates. Pat holds an MBA from the London School of Economics.

Harry Rein

Software Engineer

Harry Rein is a full stack software engineer who specializes in front end technologies and interaction design. He graduated with a bachelor's in Computer Science from MIT in 2015 and a master's in Computer Science with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction in 2016, also from MIT. He has architected multiple websites and mobile apps from the ground up and helps design and implement the UX for ChipBrain’s consumer facing web and mobile applications.

Kelly Navickas

COO

Kelly Navickas is the Founder and CEO at Carnation Capital, a bootstrapped management consulting firm that grew to over 120 clients in their first year of operation, ranging from idea stage to $1.03B in revenue. Her primary expertise is in developing tools and systems in scaling organizations, transitioning between startup and enterprise. Her involvement in the Boston startup scene began at MIT, where she studied the effect of stakeholder relationships and organization structure on startups in regional accelerators.

Saurabh Sahu

Machine Learning Research Scientist

Saurabh graduated from the University of Maryland College Park in 2019 with a PhD in Electrical Engineering. His thesis focused on building generalizable speech emotion recognition models trained with limited data. As a PhD student, Saurabh interned at Apple and multiple startups, helping them to build their foundations in the field of affective computing. After his PhD, he was employed as a research scientist at Samsung Research America where he guided the video and audio scene understanding research. At Chipbrain, he has been working on improving the conversational emotion recognition models along with analyzing the useful insights that can be gathered from thousands of hours of customer calls. Saurabh's work has been published in multiple vision and speech related journals and conferences.

Aditya Thyagarajan

Machine Learning Research Engineer

Aditya was born and raised in southern India. He holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he researched image super resolution with attractor networks. He applied this work to enhance audio files for speech recognition at nVoq Inc. His publication on Siamese Recurrent Networks has over 750 citations. As a Data Modeling Engineer at AnswerOn Inc, he developed state-of-the-art models for churn prediction (no one has crossed his accuracy to date). He optimized memory and speed of algorithms on distributed systems at Unsupervised AI. He believes that collaborating with machines will increase our ability to understand and infer from large data.