Hyderabad based Fireflies.ai, founded by MIT & Microsoft alumni, raises $5m to put a voice assistant in every meeting

“Today we are excited to announce our $5M seed round led by Canaan along with former execs from Slack, Salesforce, Dropbox, and Skype. The funding will be used to scale our engineering team and machine learning efforts.

Slack allows coworkers to collaborate around chat. Dropbox does the same for files. Fireflies lets teams collaborate around meetings.” - Krish Ramineni  CEO, Fireflies.ai

Krish was one of the youngest product managers at Microsoft HQ

Prominent Investors: 

• Canaan Partners
• Sandhya Venkatachalam Previously Vice President @ Skype & Cisco
• April Underwood Chief Product Officer Slack
• Armando Mann Vice President @ Dropbox, Salesforce

The way companies work is changing, both in terms of tools available and where teams are located. As companies grow and more org functions are created, silos are naturally formed. This leads to communication breakdowns and a decline in productivity. To add to the mix, distributed teams are on the rise and often employees are not sitting in the same building — or even in the same time zone. When in-person conversations don’t exist, even more effort is needed to keep everyone on the same page. As a result, asynchronous forms of communication are a must in the workplace today.

In between emails and Slack messages, meetings are where knowledge workers spend the majority of their day collaborating. This isn’t different for a sales rep, recruiter, product manager, or engineer. The decisions made or knowledge gained during meetings forms the basis for how work gets done. Unlike other mediums of communication, the information from meetings is completely lost the moment you leave the meeting room. It’s not automatically documented and there is no paper trail for people to refer back to.

So much of the responsibility falls on the meeting owner to recollect information and spend time performing manual data entry into CRMs, Project Management systems, or kicking off long email threads with the team.

It’s important to remember what was said but also how it was said and the context in which it was said. Unlike sending a message to the entire team on a Slack channel, you can’t simply invite everyone into a meeting. In addition, not all cross functional teams are being informed about the decisions that could impact what they are working on. We want to change the flow of information by eliminating silos and be the source of truth for conversations that originate in meetings.

How Fireflies.ai works? ​Users can connect their Google or Outlook calendars with Fireflies and have our AI system capture meetings in real-time across more than a dozen different web-conferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, GoToMeeting, Webex, and many ​more ​systems. These meetings are then indexed, transcribed, and made searchable inside the Fireflies dashboard. You can comment, annotate key moments, and automatically extract relevant information around numerous topics like the next steps, questions, and red flags.

Instead of spending time frantically taking notes in meetings, Fireflies users take comfort knowing that shortly after a meeting they are provided with a transcript of the conversation and an easy way to collaborate on the project going forward.

Fireflies can also sync all this vital information back into the places where you already work thanks to robust integrations with Slack, Salesforce, Hubspot, and other platforms.

Fireflies.ai is the bridge that helps data flow seamlessly from your communication systems to your system of records.

This approach is possible today because of major technological changes over the last 5 years in the field of machine learning. Fireflies leverage recent enhancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP), and neural nets to create a seamless way for users to record, annotate, search, and share important moments from their meetings.

Who is Fireflies for? ​The beauty of Fireflies is that it’s been adopted by people in different roles across organizations big and small:

• Sales managers​ use Fireflies to review their reps’ calls at lightning speed and provide on the spot coaching
• Marketers ​create key customer soundbites from calls to use in their campaigns.
• Recruiters ​no longer worry about taking hasty notes and instead spend more time paying attention to candidates during interviews.
• Engineers ​refer back to specific parts of calls using our smart search capabilities to make everyone aware of the decisions that were finalized.
• Product managers and executives​ rely on Fireflies to document knowledge and important initiatives that are discussed during all-hands and product planning meetings on how to get access ​Fireflies have a free tier for individuals and teams to easily get started. For more advanced capabilities like augmented call search, more storage, and admin controls, we offer different tiers for growing teams and enterprises. You can learn more about our pricing and tiers by going to fireflies.ai/pricing.

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