For organizations that do a good chunk of their work through virtual meetings, simply hitting record or taking notes isn’t enough to capture everything that’s said. Some build their own meeting integrations to capture data, but that’s time-intensive and costly. Recall.ai helps with a unified API that currently works with Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Team, and can be used to build apps that (among other use cases) automatically fill out CRMs or prompt customer reps during support calls. The San Francisco-based startup announced today it has raised $2.7 million in seed funding.
Participants in the round include Y Combinator, Cathexis Ventures, Pioneer Fund, Rebel Fund, Bungalow Capital, SV Tech Ventures and Starling Ventures. Backing also came from individual investors like Sentry CTO David Cramer, Doppler CEO Brian Vallelunga, Grain CEO Mike Adams, BloomTech CEO Austen Allred and Runway co-founder Siqi Chen.
Recall.ai’s unified API accesses meeting data, including real-time video and audio, who meeting participants are, when they spoke and joined or left the meeting and when screen sharing started and stopped. The company is currently in private beta, and its API is used by about 50 companies in a wide range of industries, including sales, customer support, hiring, user research, translation, education and healthcare.
Recall.ai founders Amanda Zhu and David Gu. Image Credits: Recall.ai
Before launching Recall.ai, co-founders David Gu and Amanda Zhu worked on a research tool that produced real-time transcription from meeting recordings. Gu told TechCrunch that a lot of his team’s engineering time was spent on building and maintaining meeting integrations, which made them realize that other companies that want to work with meeting data faced the same challenge.
The key problem Recall.ai is solving is accessing raw video and audio data from video conferencing platforms. Gu said it takes about a year for companies to build infrastructure and integrations on their own. But that’s not their only challenge — companies also have to host the infrastructure for processing, which can involve hundreds to thousands of servers. This is labor-intensive, since engineering teams have to monitor and scale everything. Recall.ai’s API not only makes it faster to build meeting integrations, but also means companies can abstract away infrastructure.
A couple examples of how Recall.ai’s customers are using its platform include one that is taking audio streams from Zoom and transcribing it, then translating it to produce real-time translations. Another is using Recall.ai to capture video and audio streams from sales meetings to automatically fill in CRM software.
Recall.ai is currently making revenue and monetizes by charging customers per minute of audio and video processed through its platform. Its plans for expansion include adding more video conferencing and telephony system integrations.