Former PrizePicks Engineer Bets on Building AI Sales Coaching Startup CloserCoach

Alim Charaniya (featured photo) knows what a rocket ship looks like from the inside. As the 19th employee at PrizePicks (and the second on its engineering team) he helped lay the technical foundation for what became one of the most dominant platforms in fantasy sports.

Now he's betting he can do it again, this time on his own terms.

Now, his new venture has nothing to do with fantasy sports. Instead, Charaniya wants to transform how salespeople learn, practice, and perform on the job.

CEO Charaniya and his co-founder/COO Taylor Martinez are building CloserCoach, an AI operating system for sales reps.  A mobile app, which Charaniya describes as the “Duolingo for sales,” delivers training and guidance directly to sales reps. That includes help preparing for upcoming calls and also providing live-in-call AI-powered coaching that helps sales reps navigate high-stakes conversations and potential objections in real time.

The app can also analyze recorded sales calls and generate a scorecard that gives both reps and managers a clearer picture of individual performance.

That kind of feedback is important for anyone who works in B2C sales. Whether selling cars, insurance, or any type of professional service, salespeople can use CloserCoach to “test different objections, different responses, and outcomes,” Charaniya added.

16 Weeks of Scale

Hypepotamus interviewed Charaniya back in 2023 when he and Martinez were working on Ambitious Labs, his first venture after leaving his role as Head of Mobile & Growth Engineering at PrizePicks.

Ambitious Labs was acquired by RapidDev in October 2025.

Building Ambitious taught Charaniya something unexpected: He loved building sales teams. And the technology they'd developed could be turned into a "huge opportunity to help other sales teams.” That insight became the early seed of CloserCoach.

Charaniya and  Martinez launched CloserCoach in October of last year. They’ve grown the platform to $400k ARR in just 16 weeks, raising an angel round along the way.

The Local Tech Flywheel

Charaniya said he wants to follow PrizePicks’ playbook by prioritizing “capital efficiency and profitability” early on.

PrizePicks completed a massive exit earlier this year when Allwyn acquired a 62.3% stake in the company for $1.5 billion. Charaniya hopes to be one of many PrizePicks alumni who go on to build successful companies and invest in emerging technology, contributing and growing the next generation of Atlanta startups.

And he has a clear roadmap in mind. He pointed to local MarTech and SalesTech success stories like Salesloft and Mailchimp as proof that Atlanta has the DNA to produce category-defining sales and marketing technology companies.

"Atlanta has already seen a lot of really great sales and marketing technology companies," he said. "I'm hoping to follow in the footsteps of some of those successes."