More funding for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round, bringing total funding to more than $12 million .
The startup has built infrastructure and integrated APIs that allow businesses to access raw data from virtual meeting platforms such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddles, and Zoom, as well as platforms without APIs. Using video and audio data, users can build apps such as her AI-powered meeting bot, sales coaching, meeting note taker, and daily standup his bot.
Recall.ai said the new funding will be used to grow its team and build integrations with more data sources. The two-year-old startup currently has nine staff members and plans to grow its team to more than 16 by the end of this year, co-founder and CEO David Gu told TechCrunch.
Gu and Recall.ai co-founder Amanda Zhu both attended the University of Waterloo before dropping out to launch their startups. “I studied software engineering, and my co-founder studied computer science and business,” she says. “We dropped out of the University of Waterloo when we were 19 and started a company together. She did Y Combinator when she was 19.”
The two previously had experience working on real-time transcription tools for video conferencing and building integrations with video conferencing platforms and related infrastructure.
The company aims to respond to two important trends: the global shift to remote work and the generative AI boom, after seeing other companies face the same issues with integrating AI tools. We launched Recall.ai in 2022.
“Companies are increasingly looking for ways to incorporate AI into their products, and conversations are a huge data set where applying AI makes a lot of sense,” Gu suggested. “In 2022, more companies will start building products using LLM. [large language models] Process data from video conferences. However, each of these companies faced the same integration and infrastructure hurdles that we encountered and resolved. ”
“Building the infrastructure and integration in-house in its most basic form takes more than a year of engineering time,” he continued. “Once built, companies face bigger challenges. Hosting the infrastructure requires hundreds to thousands of servers to handle the processing and a team of engineers to monitor, scale, and maintain it all. is.”
Gu explained that companies using Recall's APIs and infrastructure don't have to build this infrastructure themselves, which means they can quickly and cost-effectively deploy new AI-powered products and features. We used an analogy to how companies can leverage cloud computing infrastructure to: AWS scales your web apps. Recall.ai aims to provide a common infrastructure for all companies that need to access and apply AI to their conversations, he added.
“Recall.ai provides an infrastructure layer that is built on top of it, similar to how many of these companies use AWS,” he suggested. “We have no competitors because no other company offers the same service: developer infrastructure for capturing and processing meeting data.”
Recall.ai co-founders: Amanda Zhu and David Gu Image credit: Recall.ai
On the regulatory side, Recall.ai says it is SOC2, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA compliant and has no military or government contracts. Audio and video recordings are stored for up to 7 days and then automatically deleted.
“If you want to minimize data retention, we also provide an API endpoint that allows users to quickly delete data at any time,” Gu said.
The startup makes money by charging for each hour of audio and video processed through its API. In less than two years, he said, he grew Recall.ai's annual revenue from zero to millions of dollars, and now he has more than 300 enterprise customers, with a combined “millions of dollars in revenue.” ” said the user.
Over the past 12 months, the company's revenue has grown 10 times, he said.
Ridge Ventures led the Series A alongside Industry Ventures, Y Combinator, IrregEx, Bungalow Capital, Hack VC, and other existing investors.