By: Nate Bek & Kirby Winfield
Today, we’re excited to announce our follow-on investment in Yoodli, the enterprise platform for AI roleplays. Neotribe Ventures led the $13.7 million Series A, joined by our friends at Madrona, Cercano, and AI2.
We navigate the most important moments in life through conversation: closing a sales deal, interviewing for a job, or even prepping for a first date. Clear communication is often the difference between success and missed opportunity.
But most modern tools designed to improve our communication skills fall short. Corporate training still leans heavily on static formats like slide decks and recorded videos, which do little to build the real-time reflexes that define high-stakes conversations. These methods offer information, but they don’t develop skill.
Yoodli is one of the first-movers in a crop of companies innovating in this arena. Through its AI roleplays, users can rehearse high-stakes scenarios, receive real-time feedback, and improve with repetition. It’s an experiential learning tool built on a modern generative AI stack. As Founder Varun Puri puts it, “Yoodli is the batting cage before the big game — but for communication.”
Yoodli started as Project Speakeasy, a lightweight NLP tool that tracked filler words. But it has since evolved into an enterprise platform used by companies like Google, Databricks, RingCentral, Snowflake, BDO, and the University of Washington. These organizations use Yoodli to onboard employees faster, improve sales performance, and reduce the coaching burden on managers and administrators.
Rochana Golani, Databricks’ VP of learning and enablement, told The Information that one-on-one coaching is too expensive and that listening to call recordings doesn’t offer the personalized feedback employees need. Databricks, which employs thousands of sales reps, is now one of Yoodli’s largest enterprise customers.
We invested because we believe Yoodli fits squarely within our SaaS 3.0 thesis — B2B AI applications that target specific workflows and pain points with measurable impact. Communication is an overlooked domain in enterprise software. It’s critical to sales, management, and leadership, yet historically hard to train and assess at scale.
The rise of generative AI has changed that. AI roleplay is a new category that is quickly gaining traction. Salesforce, Gong, and Microsoft are all building in adjacent areas. This validates the space but also signals competition ahead. Yoodli’s edge lies in product depth, speed of iteration, and early enterprise traction. (Read Varun’s take on the competition here.)
We’ve supported Yoodli, a Seattle startup, since its first institutional round in 2022. Kirby met Varun through the AI2 Incubator and wired one of the first checks into the company. Varun previously worked with Sergey Brin at Google and brings the same level of focus to building his team. Co-founder Esha Joshi was a product manager at Apple and brings strong operational depth.
The use cases for Yoodli continue to expand. Sales enablement, manager training, leadership development, performance reviews, public speaking, media training, healthcare simulations — all benefit from practice-based learning. Roleplays can be tailored by persona, difficulty level, language, and feedback style, making them flexible and effective.
With the new funding, Yoodli will grow its team across sales, customer success, and engineering, while deepening its technology to make roleplays more realistic and personalized. You can find those jobs as they go live on the Ascend Job Board. Since our first investment, we’ve helped place multiple team members and advised through early product evolution.
We’re proud to have been early investors in Yoodli and look forward to supporting the team as it grows.
The Information first reported the round, followed by additional coverage in GeekWire.