Orai lands $2.3M seed round led by Comcast Ventures

Center City-based Orai, makers of a speech coaching app, announced Tuesday it raised $2.3 million in a seed round led by Comcast Ventures.

CEO and cofounder Danish Dhamani told TechCrunch, which first reported the news, that the company will be targeting businesses as its primary clients, letting them customize the company’s training tools to their needs.

Over the coming year, Dhamani told Technical.ly, Orai will use the funding to continue development of its technology, a version of which is also available for free in the Android and iOS app stores.

The funding allows Orai to develop the technical capabilities to build “something that’s transformative to humanity,” Dhamani said.

Um, what? Yes, there is a “greater good” tie to what the company is doing.

“Speech is a fundamental skill,” says Dhamani, a Tanzanian immigrant who came to Philly to study at Drexel University. “And there’s a lot of research that shows that if you can communicate more effectively, you’re improving your self-worth by 50 percent.”

Per the cofounder, if the company can build something that’s truly scalable and accessible to anyone in any part of the world, then it can lead to personal and professional transformation.

The company has a team of 12, six of which are based out of the Comcast Technology Center, as part of Orai’s participation in the LIFT Labs accelerator program. It was one of many companies from the cohort that would go on to strike some type of deal within the Comcast ecosystem — from venture deals to clients to licensing deals.

“Philly has been a great city,” Dhamani said. “And it’s one of the reasons we are who we are today.”

We're excited to announce our first round of #funding led by @ComcastVentures!

We're doubling down on our mission to improve workplace communication using AI-driven feedback.

If you haven't yet tried speaking into @OraiApp, download it today!
#publicspeaking #startup https://t.co/scdVJrXaTa

— Orai (@OraiApp) February 19, 2019