Every sales conversation, coached live.
ONVY is an AI audio badge for restaurant and retail staff. It hears the conversation, buzzes when a script step slips, and shows the better next line.
Don't name the price yet. Lead with the three main benefits.
- Championship
- Grand Prix, HSE KLUCH 2025 · #1 of 3,258 teams
- Pilots
- 12 restaurants
- Raised
- $14.5K pre-seed
- Signed
- LOI with RS Capital, a PE fund
- Founded
- In 10th grade, by Max Albeshchenko
Pilots, tests and partners
Superfinal awards, HSE University, Moscow, December 8, 2025.
Grand Prix of Russia's largest school case championship
- Grand Prix, HSE KLUCH National Case Championship 2025#1 of 3,258 teams, business track
- Finalist, All-Russian Olympiad in Entrepreneurship2026
- Semifinalist, Startech PrizeBest technologies by students and school students, 2026
- Featured by HSE UniversityStory about the team and ONVY, September 2026
“The business model the team proposes could be of interest to the B2B segment, in particular to companies like Rostelecom that are actively developing new lines of business.”
One shift with ONVY
A new hire takes 5–8 weeks to sell at plan and loses 8–15% of deals in the conversation. Managers can't hear why. ONVY can.
- Guest
This one looks good. How much is it?
- Server
It's $24.
- Trigger
Price named before value. Badge vibrates.
- Hint
Don't name the price yet. Lead with the three main benefits.
Illustrative dialogue. The hint is the actual wording from the ONVY prototype, translated.
- Hears
- The badge records only in the sales area and streams speech to text.
- Coaches
- A model checks each line against the script and 100+ triggers. On a miss, the badge buzzes and shows the better line.
- Trains
- After the shift, each employee gets a lesson built from their own conversations. Managers see where the team slips.
Under the hood: hardware, AI pipeline, the employee app, privacy
Hardware
- Board
- ESP32-WROOM-32
- Mic
- ST MP34DT05 MEMS
- Battery
- 500 mAh Li-Po, 12 h
- Link
- Bluetooth / Wi-Fi, microSD buffer
AI pipeline
- Speech
- Yandex SpeechKit, streaming
- Script check
- ruBERT, real-time triggers
- Coaching
- YandexGPT hints and lessons
- Platform
- React web app, Yandex Cloud
Privacy by design
Built to Russia's personal data law: signs tell customers they're recorded, no voice biometrics, no recording in private areas, encrypted audio on servers in Russia.
Offer dessert with coffee. Yesterday 6 of 9 guests didn't hear the offer. Two lines that work at table 6: listen, then try.
- 1Elizaveta P.112%
- 2Anastasia I.104%
- 3Alexey K.97%
Traction
- 12
- restaurant pilots, from a first test in 3 venues to the Chaikhona №1 chain
- 33
- venues reached; 40% of in-person visits agreed to a pilot
- $14.5K
- raised: a $5.5K grant and $9K from an angel investor
- LOI
- with RS Capital, a private equity fund with retail chains in its portfolio
Timeline and what the pilots changed
20 customer interviews at 9 chains, first financial model, team of four.
First field test in 3 venues: 14 conversations, 11 triggers caught, 330 badge-minutes. Grand Prix at the national superfinal.
Investor video conference and follow-up calls. LOI signed with RS Capital.
Pricing rebuilt around minutes of active speech.
Pilot at Chaikhona №1, a Moscow restaurant chain. 12 pilots in total.
First production batch of badges, CRM connectors, English version of the platform for a US pilot.
- Microphones picked up background music
- Added software noise reduction
- Data dropped with the internet
- Added an SD-card buffer on the badge
- A flat fee per venue ignored seasonality
- Switched to pay-per-minute of active speech
- Managers had no time for analytics
- Personal training became the core product
Four students who ship
Maksimilian Albeshchenko Founder & CEO
ONVY started with a question I couldn't drop: why does a new server need two months to sell well, when the fix is one sentence said at the right moment? I asked 20 baristas, servers and managers, recruited three students from other schools, captained the team, and built the financial model myself. When my teammates left for university, I kept going. ONVY comes with me to college: the first US market I want to test is campus dining, where every semester brings a new crew to train.
- School
- Letovo School, Moscow, 11th grade
- Owns
- Product, finance and unit economics, fundraising, pitching
- Finance
- Financial model: bottom-up market sizing, $6 cost to serve per employee, 80% gross margin, break-even in Q2 2027; led the switch to per-minute pricing
- Leadership
- Recruited and led a 4-student team to the Grand Prix, #1 of 3,258 teams, as the superfinal's youngest captain
- Academic olympiads
- Absolute winner, All-Russian Olympiad in Social Studies; top 7 worldwide, IEO Business Case
- Beyond ONVY
- Winner, Skolkovo case championship; resident, Innovators Academy; founder of a student running club with 50+ runners
-
Vladislav Fokin
CTO
Hardware and the AI pipeline. Business analyst at Strauss; winner, DEADLINE case championship.
-
Anastasia Naumkina
UX/UI & research
Customer interviews, field tests, product design. Intern at MOEX Group; winner, DEADLINE.
-
Dmitry Bronnikov
CBDO
Venue outreach and partnerships. Investment fund intern; finalist, Harvard Crimson Business Competition.
Dmitry, Anastasia and Vladislav started university in Russia and Canada in fall 2026 and advise the project. Max continues ONVY alongside 11th grade and is assembling the next team for the US version.
Pre-seed round
Raising $37.5K for 10% at a $340K pre-money valuation to ship the first production batch of badges and CRM connectors. Looking for an angel with restaurant or retail experience.
- $0.09
- per minute of analyzed speech; the badge sells at $38 at a $30 cost
- 80%
- gross margin on analyzed minutes; about $6 a month to serve one employee
- $640 M
- addressable market in Russia, bottom-up from 2.41 M frontline employees
- Q2 2027
- break-even in the financial model; IRR 44%, NPV $590K, projected
Use of funds
- Payroll
- $19K
- Marketing
- $12.5K
- Admin
- $6K
Already in: a $5.5K grant, $9K from an angel investor, and an LOI with RS Capital, a private equity fund ready to introduce ONVY to its portfolio retail chains. Ruble figures converted at 80 ₽ per dollar.
Roadmap
First production batch; connectors for Bitrix24, amoCRM and 1C
Sber Z and MIPT accelerators, Skolkovo residency, patent for the badge
US pilot: campus dining and college-town restaurants, built with a student team on campus
Talk to us
A pilot takes one week: we bring the badges, you pick the venue, you get a per-employee report. Investors get the deck and the financial model on request.
Public sources
HSE University publishes results in Russian. Our team is listed there as «Чистая прибыль, приди» (team 1279), the product as ONVY.