Fern (Formerly Ishiki Labs)

Realtime AI meeting assistant starting with sales

Winter 2026ActiveB2BArtificial IntelligenceDeep LearningGenerative AISales Enablement

Company

Fern is a real time AI that runs sales playbooks live in a sales call so any person can function as a top sales person. During the call, Fern will listen to the conversation and provide realtime coaching and help the sales person with questions about product, competitors and discovery. It’s like having a senior AE on every call giving suggestions in the background.

Verdict

High Signal

Market Opportunity

Sales enablement and conversation intelligence is a multi-billion dollar market (Gong alone is valued at $7B+). ICP is clear: B2B sales teams. Monetization path is straightforward SaaS per-seat or team pricing. The 'replace all your sales tools' angle is ambitious but indicates awareness of a full-funnel wedge strategy.

High Signal

Founder Signal

Amit Yadav (CEO) has a PhD from Purdue in 3 years, was on the original LLaMA team at Meta training multimodal LLMs, then Reality Labs building video assistant for smart glasses, with 20+ publications at CVPR/NeurIPS/ICASSP. Robert Xu (CTO) spent 4 years at Meta building Orion AR glasses (low-latency RTC, codec avatar calling) and multimodal LLM experiences for RayBan glasses, plus 1.5 years at Citadel Securities on research infra. Both have deep, directly relevant technical backgrounds in real-time AI and multimodal systems.

Low Signal

Competition

This space is extremely crowded: Gong, Chorus (ZoomInfo), Salesken, Avoma, Otter.ai, and numerous AI sales copilots (Nooks, Dialpad Ai, Second Nature for roleplay). The real-time in-call coaching angle is also being pursued by Sybill, Poised, and others. Differentiation on 'learns from every rep' and team intelligence is incremental, not a clear moat. No proprietary data advantage cited.

Medium Signal

Product

Live macOS app available for download with real features: real-time call coaching, knowledge repository, post-call analytics, role-play simulation, and integrations. Product UI is visible in screenshots and website is substantive. However, no named customer logos, revenue metrics, or testimonials are present — just 'Book a Demo' and App Store download.

OverallB Tier

Strong technical founding team with genuine deep expertise in real-time AI and multimodal LLMs from Meta — exactly the right background to build this product. The macOS app is live and feature-rich on paper. However, the competition is brutal: Gong, Chorus, and a dozen well-funded AI sales copilots are already entrenched, and the differentiation here is not clearly defensible. No traction signals (no customer logos, no revenue numbers, no press) make it impossible to know if this is gaining any foothold. The team can absolutely build the product, but winning in this market requires distribution and enterprise relationships, not just technical excellence.

Active Founders

Robert Xu

Founder

Co-founder & CTO of Ishiki Labs (W26). Previously worked on multi-modal AI and Orion AR glasses at Meta and research infra at Citadel Securities.

Amit Yadav

Founder

Cofounder and CEO at Ishiki Labs (W26). Previously: Research Scientist, first in LlaMA team training multimodal LLMs and then in Reality Labs at Meta training video assistant for smart glasses. PhD from Purdue University with 20+ publications at top conferences like CVPR, NeurIPS, and ICASSP

Fern (Formerly Ishiki Labs)

TierB Tier

BatchWinter 2026

Team Size2

StatusActive