AI Assistant Startup Fireflies.AI Closes $5M Funding Round
AI transcription and analyses startup Fireflies.ai has closed a $5 million seed round led by Canaan Partners. The funding is expected to be used to grow the startup’s employee ranks.
Meeting Transcription
Fireflies.ai is the developer of an artificial intelligence-powered assistant for businesses. The AI takes down what people say in meetings and puts together action items and other important information based on what is said. The text-to-speech service launched a little over a year ago. Fireflies is used in connection with conferencing services like Zoom and Google Meet. 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.
Besides Canaan Partners, funding for the seed round came from F7 Ventures and several angel investors including former Slack executives April Underwood and Bill Macaitis as well as Salesforce director of search Susan Kimberlin. Ramineni and Sam Udotong founded the company in 2016 and the offices in Hyderabad, India, and San Francisco employee around 20 people.
“Fireflies is not only solving a universal pain point within companies, but by capturing and structuring the conversational data from meetings, they are building a repository of previously unstructured data that was never before stored,” Rayfe Gaspar-Asaoka of Canaan Partners wrote in a blog post about the funding. “The Fireflies platform enables users to search back at past meetings with others, see what key decisions were made, and allows employees to more effectively prepare for future interactions. Being able to store, structure, and use data from past meetings will allow a company to move faster and more efficiently than ever before.”
Transcription Intelligence
Automated transcription is a growing facet of voice technology. Companies like Voicea have built thriving business models around AI assistants that transcribe and organize notes. It’s also becoming a feature in broader enterprise services offered by Microsoft and Google. Medical transcription and conversational analysis, in particular, has seen a recent growth spurt, with Amazon and Nuance among other companies pushing physicians to use their transcription and analysis AIs.
Fireflies is offering its own take on the general features, with an AI that can recognize questions, when assignments are handed out, and even the tone and feeling behind the words people are saying. As it adds more data, it also plans to build out language tools for specific kinds of jobs to enhance the effectiveness of the AI.
Follow @voicebotai Follow @erichschwartz
Amazon Launches Medical Transcription Service in Direct Competition with Nuance
