No stranger to center stage, this founder has turned to empowering others

When the COVID-19 pandemic reared its head in early 2020, the world went online. Bedrooms and kitchens became makeshift offices and classrooms as in-person interactions shifted, abruptly, to video. As the years went on, those kitchen-table desks were replaced with more professional spaces designed to facilitate at-home and then hybrid work. Families installed better lighting, purchased more ergonomic chairs, and minimized background distractions, seemingly en masse.

As our spaces got these professional upgrades, however, it seems to Rachel Cossar that one aspect of remote work stayed stuck in those early, slapdash days: our physical presence on video. Employees were hunched over their computers, maybe fixing their hair and clothing, sometimes barely in focus. They were saying all the right things in these meetings, but their body language told another story altogether.

Still, while the pandemic-driven pivot-to-video exacerbated the issue, it didn’t cause it.

Cossar may have been particularly attuned to this widespread disconnect between brain and body. She danced with the Boston Ballet for a decade between 2006 and 2016, and retired after an injury. She left the company and got an office job—with a cubicle—for the first time. Beyond the expected culture shock, Cossar started noticing something else.

“I just saw that, wow, nobody is connected to their bodies,” she says, a sharp contrast from how she spent the first 10 years (and beyond) of her working life. “People were just kind of slouched, disconnected. And they’d be verbally communicating very eloquently. But then their body language was so opposite. And I started to wonder whether they realized that they were sending a totally different message from what they intended to communicate.”

So Cossar started building out training programs designed to help people communicate more effectively by raising their awareness of their body language. She ran trainings for her colleagues, and soon her coaching was in high demand by everyone from the front-of-house staff at restaurants to salespeople and leaders at major corporations. Cossar established an LLC called Choreography for Business, and became a player in the growing industry.

“I loved the coaching, I loved the in-person aspect. I loved running workshops, which felt, to me, a little bit like the performance piece that I was missing from dancing,” she says. “And then the pandemic happened.”

Rather than dampen her business, Cossar saw that the sudden shift to video meetings only created more of a need for employees to sharpen the sort of nonverbal communication skills she knew how to teach.

Cossar took her business online—and it boomed. She taught workshops and one-on-one coaching, and realized that the personalized instruction was much more effective. But, as only one person, she needed a way to scale up, and fast. Could she teach an AI algorithm to scan, in real time, for issues such as camera angle, position in the frame, overly zealous hand gestures? Cossar brought in a co-founder and CTO to do just that—and created Virtual Sapiens (for which she is co-founder and CEO) in the process.

The company provides an AI tool that helps professionals and teams master their presence and communication at scale so they can effectively develop trust and show up to work with confidence.

Cossar’s venture and her entrepreneurial spirit grabbed the attention of the judges for this year’s Northeastern University Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. The annual awards honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. This year’s recipients—students and alumni from the Northeastern community—were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding.

Cossar was honored among winners from Northeastern’s Roux Institute, where she participated in the Techstars Accelerator, a three-month venture accelerator program in Portland, Maine. Cossar also earned second place in one of the specialty categories of this year’s Innovator Awards, “AI Powering Innovation and Impact.”

“Virtual Sapiens is a one-of-a-kind software designed to help professionals master their presence and communications,” says Mary Shea, general manager at HireQuotient and an advisor at Virtual Sapiens. “Many AI speech coach platforms focus on what you are saying, but we all know that we deliver a significant portion of our message through nonverbals—how we say what we say. From the beginning, Rachel and her team have carved out a nice niche by focusing on the nonverbal behaviors that enhance or hinder our communication. Though many other things distinguish Virtual Sapiens, this particular focus and execution on a unique and complex area of human behavior sets Virtual Sapiens apart.”

Now, four years since its founding, Virtual Sapiens is working across roughly 30 companies with employees whose ranks number about 25 on the low end, to about 1,000 on the high end, Cossar says.

New users on the platform work through a simulated conversation to establish a baseline for how they show up to video meetings. The three-question back-and-forth gives Virtual Sapiens enough information to provide the user with a full rundown afterward that includes communication strengths and areas for improvement.

From there, users have a menu of AI-powered options to fine-tune their approach to a variety of meetings. Anticipating a difficult conversation with an employee? Run through it first with Virtual Sapiens to test out delivery, eye contact, and tone of voice. Working on your elevator pitch? There’s an AI assistant for that, too.

Eventually, Cossar envisions Virtual Sapiens “under the hood” of all major employee learning and coaching programs, helping employees improve their presence in real time. Until then, seeing the company grow bit by bit is gratifying enough.

“​​I love seeing 500 users hitting our platform at the same time and all getting their feedback, and then trying again, and seeing their scores improve,” she says. “Because to me, that just demonstrates the potential of using AI in this way. When we started, we had investors who were skeptical that this could work. And we’ve shown that you can train an AI to deliver sensitive, nuanced feedback at scale. So now, seeing that happen in real time is incredible.”