AI Meeting Transcription Startup Fireflies.ai Raises $14M
Digital conference virtual assistant startup Fireflies.ai has raised $14 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures. The AI assistant operates on videoconferences to transcribe and take notes of meetings, part of the rapid expansion of this service in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and massive shift to working from home.
Fireflies AI
The Fireflies AI transcribes conversations over internet communications platforms and notes what may be extra important, putting together lists of action items and other crucial information discussed. After transcribing everything in the meeting, the AI analyzes the conversation and puts together a report with insights to share by email or through apps like Slack and Salesforce. The service launched in 2018, a couple of years after the company was founded, and added voice command capabilities in January of last year. The Fireflies.ai assistant can appear in any existing conferencing service as a virtual attendee like Zoom and Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and more.
“When we first designed Fireflies, we wanted it to work with the ecosystem of tools that we use every single day,” CEO Krish Ramineni said in a statement. “To be able to orchestrate and automate complex business workflows with just the sound of our voice is something we hope to make possible for every person in the workplace. It starts with democratizing voice-powered AI for everyday use cases like meeting notes.”
Transcribe Time
Demand has unsurprisingly spiked over the last year or so, with almost every meeting taking place online. Fireflies reported triple revenue in the last year, with notes taken on behalf of 200,000 organizations and 2 million people. The new funding will go toward expanding the company’s ability to manage more meetings and conferences. The new round is nearly triple the $5 million Fireflies raised at the end of 2019, for $19 million in total funding.
Fireflies.ai is one of the many AI transcription startups facing an avalanche of demand and interest from investors. Transcription AI startup Otter, which recently launched a virtual assistant for Zoom conference calls, is one of the most popular, raising $50 million in February. Then there’s Verbit, which closed a $60 million round in November. The demand for transcription tech is also why customer feedback analysis platform Medallia bought voice transcription startup Voci Technologies for $59 million last June. Demand for more and better tech around video meetings was on the rise before COVID-19, but there’s no denying the still rising surge in the market since the pandemic began.
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