Rampersand Investment Notes: Cor
Experience the future of software onboarding
We’re excited to announce our investment in Cor - The voice AI agent for customer onboarding and user activation.
⭐ Try Obi 2.0 - Experience the Future of Software Onboarding
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In about ten minutes, Obi will help you transform your LinkedIn profile into a superhero website using the vibe-coding tool Lovable.
A New Frontier for Learning Software
Software has never evolved faster. AI is collapsing the design → build → release loop, enabling teams to ship new features daily instead of quarterly. But while software accelerates, human comprehension has not.
Most users, especially non-technical ones, struggle to understand the tools they rely on.
They skim help docs, ignore tutorials, and bounce between support channels. Meanwhile, product surfaces expand, and features proliferate so rapidly that even power users can’t keep up.
This widening gap between what software can do and what users understand is becoming one of the most expensive bottlenecks in SaaS.
Cor is closing this gap.
Cor is building the category-defining AI avatar training platform. A new way for software companies to scale personalised, expert-led product education. Their product, Obi, is a generative video AI coach that can watch a user’s screen, understand context, and guide them step-by-step through complex workflows as if a real product expert were right there with them.
Obi is not a chatbot.
Obi is not a help centre.
Obi is learning software through conversation.
And it is the beginning of a new category.
The Problem: Users Are Falling Behind
As AI accelerates product development, users face a new reality:
1. Software evolves faster than people can learn it
Daily updates, new features, and shifting workflows compound cognitive load.
2. Static resources are obsolete the moment they ship
Tooltips, videos, and help docs can’t keep up with rapid iteration.
3. Non-technical users are overwhelmed
Press release examples like Sophiie AI highlight plumbers, electricians, and small business owners trying to make sense of advanced AI tools.
4. Customer success (CS) teams are drowning
Most CS teams spend their days talking to customers who can be represented in advance by a large average contract value (ACV). Even for growing companies with 100s of customers a month, they can’t talk to the number for a large tool like Atlassian or Airtable; it would be 10k+.
5. Trial users churn before the “aha moment”
Without a guide, many never reach activation.
The software world is getting smarter. The user experience of learning software isn’t.
That’s the bottleneck Cor solves.
The Solution: Obi - A Lifelike AI Coach That Scales Expertise
Obi represents a new modality for product learning.
It enables users to understand complex software faster and more deeply than ever before.
Where legacy onboarding offers instruction, Obi delivers comprehension.
Where documentation shares information, Obi drives transformation.
It’s a fundamentally different way for humans to learn software.
The market is pulling them.
Although Cor is in the early stages of its journey, the signals are powerful.
“Even in our daily lives as VCs, meeting with so many teams, I find myself saying to them: I know I’m biased, but you need Cor for this.” - Andrew Poesaste, Partner at Rampersand VC
High-Quality Design Partners
Cor is already working closely with a selection of sophisticated design partners across SaaS, AI-native platforms, and enterprise software. Several household-name companies (currently undisclosed) are deploying Obi directly into live customer workflows, which is rare for a product at this stage.
These early partnerships highlight both the urgency of the problem and teams’ willingness to embrace AI-led training for mission-critical onboarding.
CASE STUDY: Sophiie AI - A Virtual AI Receptionist for SMEs
Obi now runs over one hundred training sessions a month for Sophiie’s users, many of whom are non-technical tradespeople and small business owners.
Founder Jacob Banks said:
“Obi has been essential to our hypergrowth… It manages hundreds of onboarding sessions every month, helping users train and integrate Sophiie into their workflows.”
Obi enables users to configure and deploy a complex AI receptionist platform without human assistance, clear proof of the power of avatar-led training.
CASE STUDY: Canibuild – Construction and Site Planning Software
Canibuild’s customers use complex, highly contextual workflows. Obi guides them through setup and feature navigation with ease.
Users now spend 35 minutes in Obi-led sessions, reaching understanding significantly faster while freeing the CS team to focus on strategic accounts and relationships.
Chief Commercial Officer Marc Deacon shared:
“Obi helped us move from completely manual to AI-led onboarding. Customers can learn our software at their convenience, freeing our team to focus on strategy and relationships.”
This demonstrates Obi’s ability to deliver deep, contextual, workflow-level guidance—not just surface explanations.
Wide Persona Fit: From Trades to Enterprise
These case studies highlight two critical truths:
The value is immediate: users reach comprehension without frustration or human support.
The personas are broad: Obi works for everyone from non-technical SMEs to sophisticated enterprise operators.
This versatility is core to the emerging category of AI avatar training platforms.
The Founders: Insight, Curiosity, and Deep Technical Strength
Mantas Aleksiejevas (CEO)
The idea for Cor is rooted in Mantas’s experience at Google, where he saw teams repeatedly stall on onboarding.
The communications guidelines highlight his distinctive traits: calm intensity, deep curiosity, love of learning, and a passion for empowering others through accessible tools. Mantas embodies the belief that the right coach, at the right time, can change everything.
Luke Hodkinson (CTO)
A former CTO at Uptick with deep engineering experience in complex systems and computational physics. Luke is the technical architect behind Obi’s lifelike, context-aware capabilities.
Together, they balance product empathy, narrative clarity, and technical rigour: precisely what this category requires.
Why We Invested in Cor:
1. They are solving a major (growing) pain point.
Onboarding is increasingly the limiting factor for product adoption.
2. A new modality made possible by recent AI advances.
Generative video + contextual understanding unlocks a shift from static resources to interactive coaching.
3. Obi feels fundamentally NEW.
It is not a chatbot, not a walkthrough tool, not a help centre - it’s software that teaches software.
4. Early customer excitement is rare and telling.
“Never seen anything like this” comes up constantly.
5. The founders are exceptional.
They have clarity of vision, pace, humility, and an ability to articulate the story behind the category.
Final Thoughts: A New Blueprint for Learning Software
Cor is building the category-defining platform for a world where software evolves faster than humans can learn it.
As AI accelerates product development, Obi provides the missing layer: a lifelike AI avatar coach that helps every user become a power user.
We’re proud to be leading Cor’s pre-seed round as they build the future of how humans learn software.
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Really rooting for Cor because neither Guidde, Pendo, or Gainsight have been able to successfully address this issue for their customers, in my opinion. But then again those products skewed heavily on video and walkthrough text. Excited to see how Cor works in action.