Cornell Tech Alumni Close $3.2 Million Seed Round for Avina

It’s no secret that coordination between marketing and sales is an important component of generating revenue for businesses – unfortunately the reality isn’t quite so harmonious. Businesses invest countless hours and thousands of dollars crafting compelling content and targeted campaigns to capture high-quality leads. Yet when it comes to deciding what actions to take to close those deals, sellers find themselves flying blind. Marketing and sales silos, and competing KPIs, mean crucial buyer intelligence never makes it into the hands of salespeople who need it most. Instead, sales teams are left to navigate their deals with fragmented data and gut instinct, trying to piece together the signals that could help them close more deals, faster.

Ron Fisher ’16, CEO & Co-Founder of Avina, is working to solve this problem. Avina leverages artificial intelligence with a business’s unified marketing, sales, and external data stack to surface key recommendations for sellers during prospecting, outreach, meeting prep, and while working deals.

The project recently closed a successful $3.2 million seed round co-led by nvp capital and RRE Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, to support their work revolutionizing account intelligence with its AI model. Through analyzing all marketing and sales touchpoints and external buying signals, Avina is able to help its users maximize the likelihood of closing a deal by providing them with the knowledge they need to approach any conversation with confidence.

“Our project is unique in its utilization of AI to create real-time insights directly to sellers’ flow of work, enabling them to see exactly what marketing a business is consuming, spot trends, and recommend the ideal next action,”  Fisher said. “We’re excited to leverage recent breakthroughs in AI and data management to pioneer a platform that transforms a data mess into quick actions for businesses to maximize their growth at a lower cost.”

Fisher founded Avina with partners Michael Wang ’16 and Vivek Sudarsan ’16, all three of whom are graduates of Cornell Tech. In 2015, while Fisher and Sudarsan were working at Nielsen in research and development, they were invited to attend Cornell Tech as mentors. After their mentorship they decided to return to Cornell Tech for its Johnson Tech MBA & master’s of engineering programs, compelled by the emphasis on tech-focused startups during a program spanning only one year.

He and cofounder Sudarsan, already close friends at the time, applied together and were accepted to the graduate program. On the very first day of the program, they met their third cofounder Wang, and upon being introduced, the three instantly formed a close personal and professional bond. They hit the ground running, collaborating on innovative startups.

During their time at Cornell Tech, Fisher, Wang, and Sudarsan worked together in Cornell Tech’s Product Studio to create Bowtie.ai, the first AI receptionist for fitness, beauty, and health businesses. From working with engineers for the duration of the project’s development to collaboration with international teams in Shanghai and Beijing, the three capitalized on the opportunities Cornell Tech provided to both acquire and foster technical talent and tangibly utilize that talent to break into the tech industry.

After proving their startup to investors and receiving funding, Bowtie.ai grew exponentially, and in 2019, was acquired by the software and service company Mindbody.

Knowing that whatever project they embarked on next they would want to develop together, the three began jointly looking at the pain points of enterprise companies and started to juggle and bounce ideas off each other. After a period of ideation, they arrived at the proposal of Avina, collectively unearthing a massive need to understand how to create consistency for modern sales teams in a chaotic world and the ways in which AI could be revolutionary for the process, garnering interest and funding from nvp capital and RRE Ventures.

“Avina’s AI platform provides a quantum leap in coordinating marketing and sales efforts. It focuses attention on key areas of opportunity and provides targeted, actionable recommendations, creating real value for customers,” said Tom Wisniewski at nvp capital. “Avina stands out not only as a new product but a new category. Its seamless user experience and ability to drive real results are key differentiators.” nvp was an investor in Bowtie, and was eager to back the team a second time in this new venture.

Now, with the $3.2 million seed round, Fisher, Wang, and Sudarsan are planning to further grow the business. They just secured a new office on Wall Street, hired an additional engineer, and will continue to expand the team. Working alongside his best friends to create a startup that will help the economic growth of countless businesses in the years to come, Fisher’s professional pursuit in the field of AI and data analytics is proof of entrepreneurship both personally fulfilling and communally beneficial.