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

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

The startup has built an infrastructure and unified API that allows businesses to access raw data from virtual meeting platforms like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddles, Zoom, and even non-API platforms. With video and audio data, users can create AI-powered meeting bots or applications, such as sales coaching, meeting note-taking, or daily stand-up bots.

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

Gu and Amanda Zhu, co-founder of Recall.ai, both attended the University of Waterloo before dropping out to create the startup. “I studied software engineering while my co-founder studied computer science and business,” Gu said. “We left Waterloo at the age of 19 to start a business together. I did Y Combinator when I was 19.

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

They launched Recall.ai in 2022 with the aim of responding to two critical trends – the shift to remote work worldwide and the rise of generative AI – after seeing other companies facing the same problem as regarding the integration of AI tools.

“Companies are increasingly looking for ways to integrate AI into their product offerings and conversations are a massive data set where the application of AI makes sense,” Gu suggested. “In 2022, an increasing number of companies have started to create products using LLMs (large language models) to process video conferencing data. However, each of these companies faced the same integration and infrastructure hurdles that we had encountered and resolved.

“It takes a year or more of engineering to build the infrastructure and integrations internally in their most basic form,” he continued. “Once it’s built, companies face a bigger challenge: hosting the infrastructure requires hundreds or even thousands of servers to handle the processing and a team of engineers to monitor everything, do evolve and maintain. »

Companies using Recall’s API and infrastructure do not need to build this infrastructure themselves, meaning they can deploy new AI-based products and features quickly and cost-effectively, Gu explained, comparing this to how businesses can leverage cloud computing infrastructure like AWS to scale its web applications. Recall.ai aims to provide a common infrastructure for every business that needs to access and apply AI to conversations, he added.

“Recall.ai provides the infrastructure layer that many of these companies rely on, similar to how these companies use AWS,” he suggested. “We have no competitors because no other company offers the same service, namely a development infrastructure to capture and process meeting data.”

Regulatory-wise, Recall.ai says it is SOC2, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA compliant and has no military or government contracts. Audio and video recordings are retained for up to seven days, after which they are automatically deleted.

“We also provide an API endpoint for users to delete data immediately at any time if they want to minimize the duration of data storage,” Gu said.

The startup generates revenue by charging per hour of audio and video processed through its APIs. In less than two years, Recall.ai has seen its annual revenue grow from zero to several million dollars, Gu noted, saying it now has more than 300 enterprise clients that collectively bring in “millions” of users.

Over the past 12 months, the company has seen its turnover increase 10-fold, he also told us.

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