SUMMARY
The company had raised $3.8 Mn in seed stage round back in 2019
Fireflies uses a voice-based AI assistant for meetings on phone calls
About 2 Lakh enterprises are using its voice assistant to continue remote operations
Voice intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) assistant provider Fireflies has raised INR 100 Cr ($14 Mn) in Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures and Canaan Partners, which had also participated in the company’s INR 35 Cr ($4.8 Mn) seed stage round raised in 2019.
Overall, the company has raised INR 135 Cr ($18.8 Mn) to date from investors like Nearby’s founder and CEO April Underwood, Hopin’s chief business officer Armando Mann, Salesforce’s director of search Susan Kimberlin, former Slack’s chief marketing officer Bill Macaitis and Sandhya Venkatachalam, who was the former vice president of corp development Skype and Cisco.
Founded in 2016 by Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong, San Francisco and Hyderabad-based Fireflies uses a voice-based AI assistant for meetings on phone calls and brings assistant-like note-taking features, improves collaboration by automatically capturing, transcribing and sharing the important information from meetings to team members.
With Ramineni’s background in data science and customer voice analytics as well as cofounder and CTO Sam Udotong’s neural networks and deep learning background at MIT. Notably, Khosla Ventures’ partner Sandhya Venkatachalam will be joining Cannan’s partner Rayfe Gaspar-Asaoka on Fireflies’ board of directors.
The company takes an AI-heavy approach for its meeting recorder. In particular, it is looking to help streamline sales calls, recruiter interviews, customer success meetings, management meetings and user interviews. The company is bringing natural language processing (NLP) tech to interpret voice conversations and extract important information like action items, next steps, deadlines and more.
“When we first designed Fireflies, we wanted it to work with the ecosystem of tools that we use every single day. Fireflies connect to your calendar, and can even capture meetings scheduled via tools like Calendly or x.ai. The entire experience can be automated with just a few clicks,” Ramineni said.
In a previous interaction with Inc42, Ramineni had explained that Fireflies uses custom deep learning models to improve the ability to detect voice and transcribe with greater accuracy. “The power of AI is that the more conversations that our system trains on the smarter it gets,” he added. The startup is looking to use the latest funding to invest in technologies like GPT-3 and scaling core engineering efforts to support customer demand.
A part of the Series A funding would also go into expanding Fireflies’ 50 person team, distributed across five countries and 12 cities. The company is hiring actively across engineering, customer care and market teams. As the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed the remote-working trend, more than 2 Lakh organisations have adopted Fireflies’ voice assistant to take notes during meetings. It has also partnered with major video conferencing platforms, including Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, GoToMeetings and Skype.
Update: 24th May 8:23 PM
The earlier version of the story headline had a typo in the funding amount, the same has been updated to reflect the right amount.
