YC-backed Circleback is poised to become the best meeting note-taker

Like the number of startups offer speech synthesis services East croissantmeeting transcripts are becoming a common offering. There are plenty tools that offer AI Assistants who join the meeting or capture audio from your system to transcribe and summarize your meetings.

Backed by Y Combinator Return circle wants to differentiate itself by providing detailed notes and action items. Additionally, the tool allows you to automatically get insights based on the transcription.

The company was founded in 2023 by Ali Haghani, a former Stripe engineer, and Kevin Jacyna, a former Tableau engineer. The duo began creating a meeting tool that would serve as a searchable knowledge base. Initially, the tool only provided notes and actions to participants.

“We were going in the opposite direction to tools like Otter and Fireflies. We don’t want you to go back and read the transcript. We wanted to bring everything that mattered to you from this meeting together in one place. We wanted to create notes and be really good at it,” Haghani told TechCrunch in a call.

Over time, the company focused on creating a technology stack to extract the best knowledge from a meeting. Haghani said the ability to take good notes became a key growth driver for them as people started using the note-taking tool.

The company raised $2.5 million in a seed round from Transpose Platform, Rebel Fund, Pioneer Fund and angel investors including Kulveer Taggar, Oliver Jung, JJ Fliegelman, Rich Aberman, Jason Freedman and d ‘others.

Kulveer Taggar, investor and founder of the proptech startup Zeus Livingsaid he wanted to invest in the startup because of the quality of the ratings and the actions to be taken.

“Meeting transcripts are now commonplace, but the value of Circleback is in how it brings together notes, actions, and next steps. When I saw the meeting notes after using the tool, it felt like there was a human editor in play picking out key points,” Taggar told TechCrunch in a call.

The product

Circleback is a cross-platform application available on Mac, Windows and Web. You can ask the assistant to join your meeting or ask them to record your system audio.

After each meeting, you will see detailed meeting notes with different sections and key points mentioned by the speakers. If you wish, you can also view the transcription and recording. The tool also generates action items for all participants.

Haghani mentioned that while Circleback’s note-taking was good, it didn’t meet the needs of all customers.

“We realized that the general ratings we have will not serve all types of customers. So we rolled out a feature called automation that extracts certain information from each meeting based on your prompt,” Haghani.

Users can enter the information, such as a customer’s details, that they want from each meeting and add it to a Notion database or CRM. Creating automations is like creating IFTTT (If this then that) recipes or Siri shortcuts.

The general idea is that you can get different types of knowledge or ideas from the same meeting and then search across all meetings over time. Competitors such as Read AI, which have raised $50 million in Series B fundinghave tried to create tools to capture information on different surfaces to create a global knowledge base.

Positioning and future roadmap

Circleback said it has grown organically, with thousands of paying customers using its product. The company is cash flow positive, so despite strong investor interest, it did not raise more money because the founders did not want to dilute their stake.

Haghani acknowledges that there is competition in the meeting intelligence space, but he believes the startup can find good product-market fit.

“Conversational data is such a gold mine that you can provide so much value without integrating external tools. So when you add these integrations, you can add a much more reliable source of data and knowledge for customers,” he said.

“Our differentiation lies in our ability to bring together different entities that are discussed in a meeting, whether it’s a company, a person, an action or an issue in one centralized location. »

The company also plans to allow users to create automation templates and share them with the community, so others can use them. Additionally, the company plans to soon release iOS and Android apps to capture in-person conversations.