AI startup, Fireflies.ai raises $14 million to automate work from meetings
Fireflies.ai, an AI voice assistant that joins video conferencing meetings to take notes has announced the raise of $14 million in a Series A funding round, led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Canaan Partners and other angel investors.
Founded in July 2016 by Krish Ramineni and Nigerian-born, Sam Udotong, Fireflies is on a mission to transform conversations into actions. By capturing conversations, transcribing meetings, and making them easily searchable, the startup is creating an automated knowledge base for organizations.
Fireflies.ai plans to use this new funding to grow its team of 50 persons and work on new features in its product suite.
This new funding is coming after the company previously completed a $5 million seed round in October 2019, bringing its total amount raised to $19 million.
The startup revealed that more than 10,000 teams use Fireflies.ai today. In individual usage terms, some 35,000 organizations are represented amongst their user base.
Over the last year, Fireflies has been in meetings, taking notes for over 2 million people across 200,000 organizations. That is equivalent to several centuries of meetings compressed in a short period of time.
Krish Ramineni, Co-founder and CEO said, “When we first designed Fireflies, we wanted it to work with the ecosystem of tools that we use every single day. Fireflies connect to your calendar, and can even capture meetings scheduled via tools like Calendly or x.ai. The entire experience can be automated with just a few clicks.”
“Deep work is about streamlining repetitive tasks so that people don’t lose context while switching between meetings, calendars, emails, and collaboration apps. 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,” he concluded.
Following this raise, Sandhya Venkatachalam and Rayfe Gaspar-Asaoka, both of which are partners at Khosla and Canaan partners respectively, will be joining the startup’s board of directors.
Global Market Insights predicts that the video conferencing market will grow 19% between 2020 and 2026, reaching $50 billion in value by 2026. Zoom alone now hosts 45 billion minutes of webinars a year.
Fireflies.ai is addressing a few of the pain points of videoconferencing by providing note-taking tools and deep learning technologies like AI-powered transcriptions.