As the number of startups offering speech-to-text services is increasing, meeting transcripts are becoming a common offering. There are plenty of tools that offer AI assistants that either join the meeting or capture your system’s audio to transcribe and summarize your meetings.
Y Combinator-backed Circleback wants to differentiate itself by providing detailed notes and action items. Plus, the tool allows you to automatically get insights based on the transcript.
The company was founded in 2023 by Ali Haghani, a former Stripe engineer, and Kevin Jacyna, a former Tableau engineer. The duo started building a meeting tool that would act as a searchable knowledge base. Initially, the tool only provided notes and action items to participants.
“We were going in the opposite direction to tools like Otter and Fireflies. We didn’t want you to go back and read the transcript. We wanted to get everything that mattered to you from that meeting in one place. We wanted to create notes and be really good at it,” Haghani told TechCrunch over a call.
Over time, the company has focused on creating the tech stack to extract the best knowledge out of a meeting. Haghani said that being able to take good notes became a key growth engine for them as people started to use the tool for notes.
The company has 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 others.
Kulveer Taggar, an investor and founder of the proptech startup Zeus Living, said he wanted to invest in the startup because of the quality of notes and action items.
“Meeting transcriptions are commonplace now, but Circleback’s value lies in the way it collates notes, actions items, and next steps. When I saw meeting notes after using the tool, it felt like there was a human editor at play who curated key points,” Taggar told TechCrunch over a call.
The product
Circleback is a cross-platform app that is available on Mac, Windows, and web. You can ask the assistant to join your meeting, or have it record audio from your system.
After every meeting, you will see detailed notes about the meeting with different sections and key points mentioned by speakers. If you want, you can also take a look at the transcript and recording. The tool also generates action items for all participants.
Haghani mentioned that while Circleback’s note-taking was good, it didn’t suit the needs of all customers.
“We realized that general notes that we have are not going to serve all kinds of customers. So we rolled out a feature called automations that extracts certain insights from every meeting based on your prompt,” Haghani.
Users can type in the information — such as a customer’s details — they want to get from every meeting and add it to a Notion database or CRM. Creating automations is akin to making IFTTT (If this then that) recipes or Siri Shortcuts.
The overarching idea is that you can get different kinds of knowledge or insights from the same meeting, and then search across all meetings over time. Competitors such as Read AI, which raised $50 million in Series B funding, have been trying to create tools to capture information across different surfaces to create an overarching knowledge base.
Positioning and future roadmap
Circleback said that it has grown organically, with thousands of paying customers using its product. The company is cashflow positive, so despite heavy investor interest, it didn’t raise more money as the founders didn’t want to dilute their stake.
Haghani recognizes that there is competition in the meeting intelligence space, but he believes the startup can find a good product-market fit.
“Just the conversational data is such a gold mine that you can provide so much value without integrating external tools. So when you add those integrations, you can add a lot more trustworthy source of data and knowledge for customers,” he said.
“Our differentiation is that we are able to gather different entities that are being talked about in a meeting, whether that’s a company, a person, an action item, or a problem area in a centralized location.”
The company is also thinking about letting users create templates for automations and share them with the community, so others can use them. What’s more, the company plans to release iOS and Android apps soon to capture in-person conversations.
