Atlassian announced Thursday that it has acquired Rewatch, an AI-powered meeting note-taking, screen recording tool, and video hub. The company plans to integrate Rewatch into Loom, the asynchronous video messaging platform that it acquired for $975 million last October, but perhaps more importantly, it will also integrate it into its recently launched Rovo AI platform, which will allow it to, for example, instantly turn meeting notes into Jira issues and search transcripts within the overall business context.
The companies didn't disclose the amount of the acquisition. During the frenzy of early 2021, when everyone was looking for better video-centric solutions, Rewatch raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company hasn't raised any additional funding since then, according to Crunchbase.
Speaking in an exclusive interview ahead of Thursday's announcement, Loom co-founder Joe Thomas said that Loom already offers an integration with Zoom to record meetings and create transcripts, but he said that didn't feel relevant to what the company was trying to do with Loom.
“It was worth evolving our platform and bringing in Rewatch's great IP to accelerate our efforts,” Thomas said. “The reason we're excited about Rewatch is because we believe Atlassian is extremely well-positioned to take our meeting recordings and maximize their value because Loom has already generated transcripts for all the videos that have been made and is layering AI prompts around them. One of the things that sets Loom apart is its integrated search capabilities. [platform] It spans the entire enterprise and builds upon it.”
Image credit: Atlassian
Loom and Rewatch share a common investor, Andreessen Horowitz, and Thomas and Rewatch founder Connor Sears had attended the same conference a few years ago, but it was Atlassian's corporate development team that first met with Rewatch and then invited Thomas to meet with the company, too.
Thomas believes that integrating Rewatch's tech stack will actually be quite easy, especially now that Loom has migrated its stack to the Atlassian platform.
The real challenge now, he says, is to provide the best user experience. When an agent joins a meeting, it needs to understand a lot of context. It's a human-involved system, but it needs to get it right most of the time. For example, if it always suggests the wrong action items after a meeting, users will quickly give up.
“Rovo and agents are not only relatively complex technically, but also complex for end users. For example, if it's a Confluence document, what part do I update? What is the actual value-add for it to do on behalf of an end user or meeting attendee from an AI agent perspective? This is relatively new for a lot of people at Atlassian. … I think it'll probably take six to 12 months to really gel on that front, with a lot of experimentation in between,” Thomas said.
Image credit: Atlassian
Another feature of Rewatch that particularly interested Atlassian is the calendar integration. The Rewatch team created a very straightforward experience so that users only need to toggle the meeting bot on/off for each meeting. Rewatch also has a number of automation features, such as sending meeting notes to all attendees. In fact, Thomas said that while the Rewatch team faced many challenges building the product, building the calendar integration meant dealing with more edge cases and friction than building most other parts of the Rewatch stack.
Once the integration is complete, Loom AI agents will be able to join Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams meetings, with full transcripts, meeting notes, and action items created and automatically associated with Confluence pages, Jira issues, and service tickets.
He noted that Loom's mission remains to enable effective communication through video messaging in the workplace. Loom has over 31 million registered users and 360 million videos on the platform, which have collectively generated over 1 billion views. Clearly, this is something Atlassian is looking to focus on, but the company is also smartly expanding beyond this core capability of asynchronous messaging by looking at other ways in which videos and their transcripts can be generated within a business context.