Hero by Vivun

What it is

Hero is Vivun’s AI sales teammate: a Mac and browser app that researches the account before a call, shows the seller answers during it, and drafts the follow-up and updates the CRM afterward. Vivun was founded in 2019 as a presales platform for sales-engineering teams by founders who came out of technical sales, including CEO Matt Darrow, who built presales at Zuora. The company reached $10 million ARR by 2022, stalled in 2023, and in 2024 pivoted to Ava, an AI agent pitched as an automated sales engineer, laying off more than half its staff along the way (Upstarts, November 2025). Ava was renamed Hero at a relaunch on 2026-05-05 that added a self-serve plan with a 28-day free trial. Named customers on Vivun’s site include ADP, Dayforce, DocuSign, Guidewire, Restaurant365, and ServiceTitan.

What Hero is not: a presales operations platform. VivunOne, the 2023 suite for SE request tracking, feature-request-to-revenue reporting, and demo automation, no longer appears on vivun.com, which now sells Hero alone. SE leaders shopping for presales workflow software should go straight to the alternatives below.

Why it shows up in RevOps stacks

• SE-grade answers without an SE on the call. This is the job Ava was built for and Hero still does. The product, pricing, and competitive questions an AE would escalate to a sales engineer get answered on screen during the call, visible only to the seller, with battle cards and proof points drawn from the knowledge you load. Vivun reports an average of 7 live assists per call. Where AEs outnumber SEs and SE availability gates how many deals move, that frees SE time for technical validation and complex demos instead of repeating the same answers on discovery calls.
• Pre-call briefs from CRM and call history. Before a meeting, Hero pulls CRM data, past conversations, and account history into a brief covering attendees, risks, stakeholders, and a recommended angle. Vivun claims sellers reclaim 6-8 hours a week.
• CRM write-back on the entry plan. The $20 Individual plan includes read and write-back to Salesforce and HubSpot, plus Apollo, Outreach, Seismic, Intercom, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Notion, and Zoom. SaaStr’s January 2026 profile of Ava also lists Gong, Chorus, and Clari connections. After the call, Hero fills CRM fields, drafts the follow-up email with a business case, builds ROI documents and action plans, and flags deals missing a close date.
• MCP connections into the rest of the stack. Hero uses MCP to pull context from, and write back to, Salesforce, HubSpot, Apollo, Outreach, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Slack, Notion, and Google Docs, over connections Vivun describes as “scoped and permissioned.” Vivun does not document which outside AI clients, such as Claude, can call Hero, so treat MCP as how Hero reaches your tools, not as an agent API you can build on.
• No bot in the meeting. Transcription runs bot-less from the Mac app or the browser, which matters when a buyer’s security team blocks notetaker bots from joining calls.

Pricing

Vivun publishes self-serve prices on meethero.ai, checked 2026-09-12:

• Individual — $20 per seller per month, free for the first 28 days with no card. Live call assistance, bot-less transcription, chat and voice, Salesforce and HubSpot read and write-back, the productivity and sales-tool connections above, MCP support, and email support. The trial converts to this plan once a card is added.
• Team — $40 per seller per month, listed as early access. Adds shared workspaces, cross-team knowledge, seat management, basic roles and analytics, and priority support.
• Enterprise — custom. Adds SSO and SCIM, advanced roles and analytics, enterprise data controls, volume pricing, and expert-led onboarding.
• What teams pay. Ten sellers on Individual cost $2,400 a year; on Team, $4,800. The named-logo customers sit on Enterprise: Vendr’s listing for Hero by Vivun, from before the self-serve launch, reported an average contract of about $49,400 a year with average savings near 27% off the first quote. Budget Team pricing for a pilot group, and expect an Enterprise quote once SSO, SCIM, or a security review is on the requirements list.

Best for

• Sales leaders and RevOps at B2B companies selling a technical product, where AEs lean on a thin SE bench for product and competitive answers and SE capacity limits deal volume
• Individual AEs who want pre-call research, live answers, and CRM write-back for $20 a month without waiting on a procurement cycle
• Not for SE leaders who need presales operations software for request intake, POC and evaluation tracking, and feature-request reporting (look at Opine); not for teams whose main need is coaching scorecards and forecast rollups across 50+ reps (Gong); and not for buyers who need a record of independent results first, since Hero has fewer than ten G2 reviews

Alternatives — and when to pick them instead

• Gong — the segment leader, with ARR past $500M growing over 55% year over year as of May 2026, 5,000+ customers, and a Vendr median near $55,000 a year plus a mandatory platform fee. Pick Gong when conversation intelligence, coaching, and forecast inspection across a large sales org are the purchase. Pick Hero when the need is in-call help for individual sellers and a $20-40 seat price has to fit the budget.
• Salesforce Agentforce — the CRM-native option. The Agentforce Sales add-on is $125 per user per month and requires Sales Cloud Enterprise ($175) or above. Pick Agentforce when you already run Enterprise or Unlimited and want agents inside Salesforce records and flows. Pick Hero when you run HubSpot, or when the job happens on the live call rather than in the CRM.
• Attention — the fastest-growing entrant, with a $30M Series B on 2026-06-24 and ARR up 4x. Its agents send the follow-up and fill CRM fields after the call. Pick Attention when post-call automation across a 20-50 seat team is the job. Pick Hero when the question is what the seller says during the call.
• Sybill — published pricing, with CRM Autofill, API, and MCP access on its $90 per user per month Business tier. Pick Sybill when you want an MCP-exposed deal record that your own agents can query. Pick Hero when live in-call guidance is the requirement, at under half the seat price.
• Opine — presales automation for SE teams: evaluations, requests, playbooks, and trends in one workspace synced with CRM, email, Slack, and call transcripts. It raised a $5 million seed led by S3 Ventures in December 2025 and quotes each deal. Pick Opine when the SE team, not the AE, is the user and you need to measure presales work.
• Consensus — demo automation that sends interactive and video demos to the buying committee. Starter is $600/month billed annually for 5 users. Pick Consensus when SE time goes into repeated first demos rather than repeated answers.

Watch-outs

• The company is mid-turnaround. Vivun raised $131 million, missed consecutive quarters in 2023, and laid off more than half its staff to pivot. Guard: stay on monthly Individual or Team billing during the pilot, cap any Enterprise term at 12 months with no multi-year prepay, and write data export and deletion terms into the order form.
• Every result figure is vendor-reported. The 25% larger average deal size, the 6-8 hours a week, and the 7 assists per call come from Vivun with no published methodology, and the G2 base is under ten reviews. Guard: run the 28-day trial with 5-10 sellers against a control group, and measure prep time per call, time from call end to follow-up sent, and CRM field completion.
• Live answers can be wrong in front of the buyer. An in-call suggestion about pricing or a competitor reaches the seller’s mouth before anyone checks it. Guard: load only approved pricing, discount rules, and battle cards; have an SE review the knowledge base monthly; and train sellers to confirm any number Hero surfaces before saying it.
• Self-serve seats bring CRM write-back without admin controls. Individual seats write to Salesforce and HubSpot, but SSO, SCIM, and advanced roles arrive only on Enterprise, and Team is still early access. Guard: once more than a handful of reps sign up on their own, consolidate them onto one managed contract, and limit which CRM fields Hero can write through the connected user’s field permissions.