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Solidroad puts sales reps inside AI-powered conversation simulations before they ever face a real customer.
ENTRY ANGLES
AI sales training simulators built with game design principles (levels, progression, feedback loops, competition, narrative stakes) · Game-native approach to sales training rather than gamified courses · Adapt Hack The Box's game-based learning model to sales training domain
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Game design and mechanics expertise, AI conversation simulation and scoring, Sales domain knowledge and curriculum design
Solidroad built an AI simulator for practicing customer-facing conversations.
Its target customers fall into three groups:
- Outsourced call centers providing customer service on behalf of other companies. - Large enterprises with in-house contact centers, technical support teams, and sales organizations. - Small and mid-size businesses that lack the internal expertise or resources to run rigorous hiring and training processes for customer-facing staff.
The workflow has three stages:
- Build scenarios – create the scripts that guide the AI-powered customer personas trainees will interact with. Ready-made templates are available on the platform, or teams can build from scratch. Recordings of real customer calls can also be uploaded, and the platform will generate scenarios from them for editing.
- Run the simulation – an employee engages with the AI persona by voice, text chat, or email.
- Review feedback – immediately after the conversation, the platform delivers a structured performance assessment broken down by evaluation criteria.
One use case is candidate screening: embed a simulator session early in the hiring funnel to filter out applicants who can't handle customer interactions before spending time on interviews. The advantage over a human-led screen isn't just efficiency – it's consistency. The AI applies identical criteria every time, with no interviewer bias.
For existing employees, the simulator supports ongoing skill development in self-directed mode – freeing managers from training time while giving reps access to a full range of conversation scenarios.
Managers can also build structured training courses – selecting a topic, sequencing simulated conversations at increasing difficulty levels, and guiding new reps from baseline competence to confidence. Gamification elements can be layered in to keep the experience engaging.
Courses are useful not just for general onboarding. A particularly practical application: train the entire sales team on a new product, a new pricing structure, or a new objection before it's rolled out. Once a rep completes the course and earns the certification, the manager has documented assurance they're actually ready.
Solidroad claims its platform delivers:
- 2x faster ramp time for new hires - 10% reduction in performance-based attrition - 12 hours per week saved for sales managers who'd otherwise handle training manually
Founded last year in Ireland, Solidroad has now raised €1.1 million in its first funding round.
The market for AI-powered sales training simulators is expanding fast – and for good reason. In the US alone, there are 5.7 million professional salespeople. That's roughly 1 in 8 working Americans.
Hiring for those roles is its own challenge: sales has one of the highest turnover rates of any profession, at around 35% annually. That means companies are constantly sorting through candidates, and AI-assisted screening could recover a significant portion of that time.
Take2, [covered in April](/review/s-tem-zhe-samym-na-drugoj-rynok), built its AI simulator specifically for the hiring use case and raised $3 million in a single round.
For training existing employees, Zenarate ([covered here](/review/bylo-7-7-milliardov-dollarov-budet-eshhjo-bolshe)) has raised $18 million across two reviews; and Hyperbound (previously reviewed) graduated from Y Combinator last year.
Solidroad's stated differentiator is its "flight simulator" framing – positioning the platform as a high-fidelity practice environment with an engaging, game-like quality.
The problem is that the website doesn't really deliver on that promise. There's a single mention of gamification elements that can be added to courses – nothing that makes the experience feel meaningfully different from other simulators.
That's a missed opportunity. Because lean into it fully – that could be Solidroad's genuine edge in a crowded market.
The model to look at is Hack The Box ([related review](/review/dolgo-zarabatyvat-na-obuchenii-mozhno)), which built a cybersecurity training platform where the learning *is* the game. Everything is designed around game mechanics – challenge levels, leaderboards, community, narrative. It became enormously popular and raised $55 million in a single round last year, bringing total funding to $69.5 million. Gamification wasn't a feature – it was the product.
The direction: AI sales training simulators are a large market with real demand, and the category is still early enough to carve out a distinctive position.
The way to stand out isn't adding "elements of gamification" as a checkbox – it's building the simulator around game design principles from the ground up. That means levels, progression, feedback loops, competition, and narrative stakes – not just a conversation scored on a rubric.
What would a genuinely game-native AI simulator for salespeople look like – and what can be borrowed from the Hack The Box playbook for a completely different domain? Those are the right questions to be asking.
Because people who don't like training often love playing.