YC-backed Recall.ai gets $10M Series A to help companies use virtual meeting data

More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over $12 million.

The startup has built infrastructure and a unified API that enables companies to access raw data from virtual meeting platforms like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddles, Zoom and even platforms with no API. With the video and audio data, users can build AI-powered meeting bots or apps such as sales coaching, meeting notetaker or daily standup bots.

Recall.ai said the new capital will be used to grow its team and build integrations with more data sources. The two-year-old startup currently has nine staff and expects to grow its team to more than 16 by the end of this year, David Gu, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

Gu and Recall.ai co-founder Amanda Zhu both attended the University of Waterloo before dropping out to build the startup. "I studied software engineering while my co-founder studied computer science and business," Gu said. "We dropped out of Waterloo when we were 19 years old to start a company together. I did Y Combinator when I was 19."

The duo previously worked on a real-time transcription tool for video conferences and had experience building integrations with video conferencing platforms and the associated infrastructure.

They launched Recall.ai in 2022 with the aim of responding to two critical trends -- a shift to remote work worldwide and the boom in generative AI -- after witnessing other companies face the same problem they did around integrating AI tools.

"Enterprises are increasingly looking for ways to incorporate AI into their product offerings and conversations are a massive dataset where applying AI makes a ton of sense," Gu suggested. "In 2022, a growing number of companies started building products that used LLMs [large language models] to process data from video conferences. However, every single one of these companies was running into the same integration and infrastructure hurdles we had encountered and solved."

"It takes a year or more of engineering time to build the infrastructure and integrations in-house in the most basic form," he went on. "Once it's built, companies face a bigger challenge: Hosting the infrastructure requires hundreds to thousands of servers to handle the processing and a team of engineers to monitor, scale and maintain everything."

Enterprises that use Recall's API and infrastructure don't need to build out this infrastructure themselves, which means they can deploy new AI-powered products and features rapidly and cost-effectively, Gu explained, likening it to how companies can tap cloud computing infrastructure like AWS to scale their web apps. Recall.ai aims to provide the common infrastructure for every company that needs to access and apply AI to conversations, he added.

"Recall.ai provides the infrastructure layer that many of these companies build on top of, similar to how these companies use AWS," he suggested. "We don't have any competitors, as there aren't any other companies offering the same service which is developer infrastructure to capture and process meeting data."

On the regulatory front, Recall.ai says it's SOC2, GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA compliant and has no military or government contracts. Audio and video recordings are stored for a maximum of seven days, after which they are automatically deleted.

"We also provide an API endpoint for users to delete the data immediately at any time if they want to minimize the duration we store the data for," Gu said.

The startup earns revenue by charging per hour of audio and video processed through its APIs. In less than two years Recall.ai has grown annual revenues from zero to several million dollars, Gu noted, saying it now has more than 300 enterprise customers which collectively bring "millions" of users.

Over the past 12 months, the company has seen 10x growth in revenue, he also told us.

Ridge Ventures led the Series A along with Industry Ventures, Y Combinator, IrregEx, Bungalow Capital, Hack VC and other existing investors.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/29/recall-ai