Enterprise Conversational AI Assistant Xembly Raises $15M
Conversational AI enterprise assistant startup Xembly has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Xembly leverages natural language processing to power an AI that can process what people say in meetings well enough to take notes and automatically generate to-do lists and related follow-up documents to share with participants, as well as set up meetings that fit participant schedules.
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Xembly designed its service as a tool that businesses can embed in their communications platforms, including email, Slack, and digital meeting spaces. The AI transcribes verbal conversation during meetings, processing it to tease out important elements, post-meeting action, and future events. The notes and potential meeting times are then forwarded to participants. The new round quadruples Xembly’s previous funding to $20 million total. The capital infusion will go toward enhancing the capabilities of the AI and widening the startup’s reach.
“Employers and employees alike are being asked to do more with less, yet solutions to support them are antiquated and incapable of smartly automating tasks that eliminate work and drive meaningful improvement,” Xembly CEO Pete Christothoulou said. “AI advances in natural language processing and machine learning allow Xembly to deliver a new interaction model that finally frees the world’s knowledge workers of time-consuming tasks so they can get real work done.”
The AI meeting assistant has become a common piece of business technology, with adoption accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. New and upgraded platforms with comparable services have mushroomed. The most notable example might be Otter.ai, which underwent a huge update and expansion to add AI-powered meeting summaries and action items a year after raising $50 million. Xembly works more as a central gathering of different conversational sources, however, while Otter’s platform is designed to replace tools like Slack. Meanwhile, funding rounds like Airgram’s $10 million raise, Speechmatics raising $62 million, and Kore.ai’s $70 million make it clear the businesses are not done integrating the tech into their work. The interest has spurred growth even in more on-way speech recognition from companies like Verbit and others focusing on captioning media.
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