Ovida

Ovida is a UK-registered company offering an AI platform that assesses real workplace conversations against a defined benchmark of effective communication behaviors and gives individuals a place to practice the behaviors they need to improve. The product has two main modes: a private "Skills" track in which a user rehearses a specific behavior with AI agents and an AI coach at their own pace, and "Meeting Review", in which a user shares one real conversation with a trainer, mentor or manager who receives the conversation with the relevant moments already identified. Conversations can be held in Ovida's own video rooms (the recommended route) or uploaded from Zoom, Teams or other recordings where enabled. Assessments score named behaviors such as active listening, powerful questioning and holding silence at defined levels, with timestamps linking a score to a specific moment in the call; the company states a review can be ready within minutes of a call ending. The product currently supports English only.

Ovida positions its work around two application areas: Strategic Leadership (leadership development, ethical leadership, coaching and mentoring) and Business Performance (sales, client advice, patient consultations, governance, risk and compliance, and other high-stakes discussions), with industry framing for healthcare, financial advice and professional services. Its marketing argument rests on published research it cites, including a Cochrane review of 215 controlled studies across roughly 28,000 professionals indicating that educational meetings produce small improvements in professional practice, and third-party figures from Gallup, DDI and McKinsey on the business impact of leadership quality, which the company presents as industry research rather than its own outcomes.

Privacy and consent are a central design claim: each participant controls what is recorded, retained and shared; either participant can discard a recording before processing; there is no stated administrative override allowing an employer to open a user's meetings or private practice sessions; and data can be permanently deleted. Ovida states it is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and ISO 27001 certified, with HIPAA in progress, and maintains a Trust Center with current certification status, policies and controls.

Business model

Ovida sells an AI conversation-measurement and practice platform to organizations, which configure a benchmark of communication behaviors drafted with their own subject-matter experts and deploy the tool across leadership tiers or client-facing teams, with per-participant consent and individual data ownership. The company describes the value it sells as the work around the underlying language models — a customer-specific validated benchmark, speaker separation and timestamps, defined levels per behavior, longitudinal records of where each person sits over time, and consent handling — rather than the models themselves. Go-to-market includes booked demos using a sample conversation.

Traction

The website lists testimonials from practitioners at the Mayo Clinic, NYU's SPS Coaching Innovation Lab, a retired Deloitte partner and vice chair, and coaching firms ThoughtSmiths and FLUXIFY, and states that universities, Fortune 500 companies and independent practitioners use the product for sensitive conversations. It won first place in the SHRM 2024 Global Workplace Tech Innovation Award from more than 600 entrants and states it is backed by Techstars. One third-party business directory lists the company at 11-20 employees.