About Verse.ai
Verse is a next-generation lead conversion platform leveraging conversational AI and highly-skilled human agents.
We focus on engaging, qualifying, and converting inbound leads for marketing and sales teams. Our mission is to close the lead conversion gap by driving significantly higher revenue for our customers while giving their prospects a better experience along the way.
Our leadership team
David Tal
Founder
David Tal is the founder of Verse. Born and raised in San Diego, and a VC-backed entrepreneur for 10+ years, David has always been passionate about “putting San Diego on the map” as a center of tech, innovation, and disruption. This passion has driven him and Verse to become one of San Diego’s fastest growing companies.
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After graduating with a BS in Economics from UCLA in 2003, David experienced firsthand how quickly the world had moved online and how consumer journeys increasingly began and lived online. David also saw how businesses were trying to engage and communicate with this new growing stream of online leads and prospects. So, David set out to help companies in real estate and other industries create effective and authentic connections with their prospects by effectively merging the best abilities of technology and people. David lives in San Diego with his beautiful, successful wife and three children.
Avi Tal
Co-Founder and Head of Product
Avi Tal is a co-founder and Head of Product at Verse. He oversees the company’s operations, products, and strategy. Prior to launching Verse, Avi founded a WiFi media network in Latin America by partnering with hotel chains to inject hyperlocal content catered to business travelers on hotel WiFi authentication pages.
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This product was quickly adopted and scaled to over 150,000 hotel rooms across Mexico. The business eventually merged with a venture capital-backed company. This was Avi’s first foray into the exciting world of Silicon Valley, where he learned about developing technologies, building teams, and raising venture capital. After witnessing firsthand how merging the best abilities of technology and people helped businesses create the most timely, effective, and authentic connections with their prospects, David and Avi went on to launch Verse in 2013. Avi lives in Mission Beach, where you can catch him riding some waves during his lunch break on a sunny day.
Damien Swendsen
Senior Vice President of Revenue
Damien is excited to bring over 20 years of experience in Sales, Marketing, and Management to Verse. He has helped run Sales in small, midsize, and enterprise companies. Coming to us most recently from Demandbase, Damien was responsible for all aspects of their Data and Sales Intelligence lines of business, including Sales, Marketing, Partnerships, and Product.
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Before then, he oversaw the successful acquisition of InsideView, where he led Sales and grew a mid-market organization into a successful Enterprise platform. Prior to that, he sold at Oracle, as well as managed teams at Pivotal and Onyx Software. Damien was born and raised in San Francisco, and now lives in San Jose with his wife and four children. He enjoys spending time with his family, playing soccer, hiking, and anything athletic or competitive.
Joel Abitan
Vice President of Engineering
Joel Abitan serves as the Vice President of Engineering and has been a leader at Verse since its inception. He has spent the past decade building internet technologies aimed at bridging the interaction gap between machines and humans. Joel’s passion for humanizing technology is most visible in his work leading Verse’s engineering department.
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He encourages his team to be creative and effective leaders by fostering an atmosphere of psychological safety and a culture of unwavering values.
Dennis Eaton
Vice President of Contact Center Ops
Dennis Eaton serves as the Vice President of Contact Center Ops at Verse. Dennis brings over 20 years of experience in workforce management, training, quality, project management, and vendor management. Dennis has led large-scale operations of care organizations up to 2,500 at companies like Nike, Oracle, ADP, and Walt Disney World.
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Dennis has the ability to connect with his teams to drive a positive culture while improving overall performance. Dennis holds a BS in Management Information Systems from the University of Central Florida and an MBA from Rollins Crummer Graduate School of Business. In his spare time, Dennis enjoys snow skiing, surfing, golf, hiking, riding his KTM, and spending time with his family.
Cassandra Pazderny
Vice President of Client Success
Cassandra Pazderny is an accomplished customer success leader with over 15 years of experience in marketing and sales technology. She is known for her ability to build and lead high-performing teams that create exceptional customer experiences while delivering measurable business results.
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With her vast expertise across multiple verticals, market segments, and regions, Cassandra has collaborated with thousands of companies to drive rapid revenue growth for their organizations. Cassandra is based in Austin, Texas and has a Bachelor’s in Business Administration with a major in marketing. She enjoys travel, hiking, outdoor adventures and time with family outside of work. Her proven track record of success is a testament to her passion and commitment to excellence in customer success leadership.
Our investors
Verse is backed by strong investors who believe that solving for the challenges around lead conversion is the next frontier in marketing and sales performance.
How it all began
In 2013, digital marketing professionals David and Avi Tal co-founded Verse as a solution to a fundamental problem virtually all businesses experience – the lead conversion gap. Most companies have a great difficulty just establishing meaningful contact with the leads that they spend so much money and time to generate—let alone qualifying, nurturing, and converting them into sales. And, to a varying degree, almost every marketer has experienced their budget and effort needlessly wasted which results in frustration for them and lower revenue for their business.
The Tals researched call centers but found out that they were too expensive and couldn’t manage high lead volume well. When they looked at marketing and sales enablement software solutions, they couldn’t find any that could create truly authentic conversations, support real-time 2-way text and omnichannel communications, campaign-level nurturing, or switch instantly to conversations with human reps at the right times.
So, they put together the combination of experts in communications technology, AI, NLU (Natural Language Understanding), data ingestion, integration, CRM technology, data science, and contact center management that was required to optimize lead engagement, qualification, nurturing, and conversion.
Today, Verse is the leader in lead conversion and serves the lead engagement and qualification needs of a range of customers including small businesses and large organizations in various industries such as Real Estate, Mortgage, Home Services, Clean/Solar Energy, and others.