There are plenty of startups now that have AI bots that will listen to your meetings, transcribe them, make notes, and create insights. That means companies in this area must differentiate themselves by offering additional feature sets and integrations.
Read AI, the startup founded by former Foursquare CEO David Shim along with Rob Williams and Elliott Waldron, is integrating its co-pilot in email, Slack and enterprise tools like Hubspot, Jira, and Confluence so it know more about your conversation about a certain project or with a certain client across the apps.
To accelerate its product development, the company has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Smash Capital with participation from existing investors Madrona and Goodwater Capital. Notably, the Series B fundraiser comes just six months after the startup raised $21 million in Series A.
Shim told TechCrunch that after its raise earlier this year, the company has had high momentum of customer growth, with more than 100,000 new accounts created everywhere. The company utilized these numbers to raise another round.
” In less than six months, we’ve doubled our sign-ups, active users, and MRR, far surpassing even our most aggressive projections. We’re leveraging this momentum to raise now, ensuring we can accelerate growth with a partner who shares our vision of an AI copilot everywhere—delivering value not just to enterprises but to consumers at scale,” he said.
Shim didn’t specify Read AI’s valuation but said that with this round, it got an upgrade in valuation to match its growth.
Brad Twohig, co-founder and managing partner at Smash Capital, said that when investing, he often looks for companies with product-led growth, and Reads fits well in that mold.
“I love finding companies in spaces that both cater to large group of people and have an enterprise component at the same time,” he told TechCrunch over a call.
Product evolution
Read AI launched an integration with email, messages, and meeting apps earlier this year. The company is today releasing a Chrome extension that could display your scheduling link, latest meeting reports, a quick add-to-meeting option, and recommendations, which are insights from meetings.
The extension can also highlight key points for a lengthy thread. It can also help you create a draft by keeping all emails, messages, and meetings across platforms in context. Other email clients like Shortwave and Superhuman also have these capabilities.
What’s more, the extension can also highlight quick notes from meetings or Slack messages about the same topic in the email thread.
Read AI is offering the Chrome extension for free. Shim noted the latest fundraiser was another reason to develop and scale products like this and offer them without cost.
“Where we’re going towards is more wherever you work, we’re pulling in that content, and we’re giving you summaries, we’re giving you recommendations. That’s a bigger opportunity, but there is a bigger cost center associated with it. And so for us, we’re very much focusing on growing that market while maintaining the lead that we have on the meeting note side,” Shim said.
Read AI’s play gives you more knowledge and insight about a particular conversation, topic, or project by integrating different services and having large language models make sense of all that text.
Smash Capital’s Twohig believes that meeting transcripts are becoming a commodity, but Read AI’s approach of deploying its copilot everywhere can turn it into a fine business.
“We ran into Read AI as an assistant showing up at meetings and taking notes. But when we sat down with David, we understood a broader vision and concept of having a co-pilot anywhere. This tool can follow you through day-to-day tasks, keep helpful records, and allow you to be a better teammate.”
Read AI currently has 40 people on its payroll and the company aims to expand to 100 people by the end of the Q1 2025.