Meeting recording is becoming a common service as the number of startups offering speech-to-text services increases. There are many tools that provide AI assistants that can join meetings, capture system audio, and transcribe and summarize meetings.
Y Combinator-backed Circleback aims to differentiate itself by offering detailed notes and action items. Additionally, this tool allows you to automatically gain insights based on your transcripts.
The company was founded in 2023 by former Stripe engineer Ali Haghani and former Tableau engineer Kevin Jacyna. The two began building a conferencing tool that would serve as a searchable knowledge base. Initially, the tool only provided participants with notes and action items.
“We were going in the opposite direction of tools like Otter and Fireflies. We didn't want people to go back and read the records. We wanted to take all the important information from that meeting and put it in one place. We wanted to make notes and get really good at it,” Haghani told TechCrunch over the phone.
Over time, the company has focused on creating a technology stack that brings out the best knowledge from meetings. Haghani said being able to take notes properly became a key growth driver as people started using tools to take notes.
Image credit: Circleback
The company has raised a $2.5 million seed round from Transpose Platform, Rebel Fund, Pioneer Fund, and angel investors including Kulveer Taggar, Oliver Jung, JJ Fliegelman, Rich Aberman, and Jason Freedman.
Kulveer Taggar, founder and investor at proptech startup Zeus Living, said he wanted to invest in the startup because of the quality of its notes and action items.
“Meeting transcriptions are commonplace now, but the value of Circleback is in the way it collates notes, action items, and next steps. When looking at meeting notes after using this tool, human editors It felt like we were cherry-picking the key points,” Tager told TechCrunch over the phone.
product
Circleback is a cross-platform app available for Mac, Windows, and the web. You can ask your assistant to join a meeting or record audio from the system.
After every meeting, you will see detailed notes about the meeting, including the various sections and important points made by the speakers. You can also review transcripts and recordings if you wish. This tool also generates action items for all participants.
Haghani said that while Circleback's note-taking is good, it doesn't fit every customer's needs.
“We realized that the general notes we had could not serve every type of customer, so we created specific insights from every meeting based on prompts. We introduced a feature called automation that extracts
Users can enter the information they want to capture from all meetings (such as customer details) and add it to their Notion database or CRM. Creating an automation is similar to creating an IFTTT (If this then that) recipe or a Siri shortcut.
Image credit: Circleback
The overarching idea is that you can get different types of knowledge and insights from the same meeting and search through all meetings over time. Competitors such as Read AI, which raised $50 million in Series B funding, are developing tools that collect information across various dimensions to create comprehensive knowledge bases.
Positioning and future roadmap
Circleback said it has thousands of paying customers using its products and is growing organically. Despite the company's positive cash flow and strong investor interest, no further funding was raised because the founders did not want to dilute their stake.
Haghani recognizes that there is competition in the meeting intelligence space, but believes the startup can fit well into the product market.
“Conversation data alone is a treasure trove that can provide so much value without integrating external tools. So adding these integrations helps us add a more trusted source of data and knowledge for our customers. ” he said.
“What sets us apart is our ability to bring together the various actors being discussed in a meeting, including businesses, individuals, action items, and issue areas, in one central location.”
The company is also looking at allowing users to create automation templates and share them with the community for others to use. In addition, the company will soon release iOS and Android apps for capturing face-to-face conversations.