Earlier this year, Medal, a startup known for its video game clipping capabilities, announced a cross-platform AI assistant called Highlight. The company is currently spinning off Highlight into a new company and has raised $10 million in a funding round.
General Catalyst led the funding round, with participation from Valor, SV Angel, and Conviction Embed. Medal also invested $3 million in the new company, out of the $13 million it raised in July.
Medal co-founder Pim de Witte is now the only common link between Medal and Highlight. The latter has its own team, including Haris Butt, former VP of design at productivity company ClickUp, Medal co-founder Josh Lipson, and Highlight, and Mark Bond, Medal's first head of growth. Mr.
“We started Highlight as a research project within Medal. We wanted to explore the translation layer between the LLM (Large Language Model) and what's happening on screen. , we realized that Highlight needed to become a separate entity as we grew rapidly and hired engineers for certain apps by offering them equity,” De Witte said over the phone with TechCrunch. told.
Highlight is a cross-platform desktop app that allows you to ask your LLM questions by attaching your screen, voice notes, or documents as context. The app can also transcribe calls from your system audio, so you can ask questions about a specific meeting later.
You can perform actions that have become very common in AI assistants, such as summarizing, rewriting, highlighting, and explaining the context associated with your app during a query.
In July, the company unveiled a platform that allows developers to build apps on Highlight. However, the startup realized that this approach limited custom actions to a small number of developers. The latest version allows users to be prompted to take a custom action, such as summarizing the first 10 minutes of a meeting. Highlight also wants to open up prompts to its community of users so that one person can discover useful automations that others have created.
The company is publishing an agent framework for developers with programming knowledge that allows them to use parts of the system to perform small tasks in the background, such as summarizing documents in a particular folder. It's planned.
“Our idea is to create virtual employees and delegate some of the tasks to them so they have more time,” says de Witte.
Image credit: Highlight
With today's announcement, the company is releasing push-to-talk shortcuts and a new conversation app to record meetings.
Niko Bonatsos, a venture partner at General Catalyst, told TechCrunch in an email that Highlight is easier for users to understand because of its on-screen context and lack of complex prompts.
“I have been overwhelmed by the fact that most consumer AI companies only allow you to interact with them via a chat interface…This shows a lack of imagination and frankly limits what you can do with this powerful new technology. We're very encouraged by the bold design choices Pimm and his team have made so far,” said Bonatsos, adding that Highlight's combination of automation and on-screen context will help users interact with AI. He pointed out that it can be used more effectively.
Highlight AI is free to use for now, but the company hopes to have pricing plans based on the number of words processed by the assistant in the future.