Otter.ai provides AI-powered meeting transcription and live, interactive transcripts for in-person and web conferencing (notably Zoom and Google Meet). During 2020 it transcribed over 100 million meetings totaling more than 3 billion minutes and saw an 8x increase in revenues. The company reports “many millions” of standalone product users and converts free users to paid plans for business-grade features. Otter.ai plans to expand beyond transcripts into "conversation intelligence" to extract meaning from meetings via topic time, intonation and sentiment. It intends to grow its corporate footprint by staffing up sales and hiring across R&D, AI science, engineering, design and product management, aiming to triple its current 25-person team by year-end. Transcripts are encrypted in transit and at rest but are decrypted during processing and used as training data—a practice the company acknowledges could limit adoption in sensitive contexts. Otter.ai offers real-time, automated transcriptions that are searchable, identify different speakers and key phrases, and allow users to upload photos alongside recordings. The company launched its service in 2018 and has expanded to millions of users, offering Otter for Teams and an enterprise tier. Its team includes engineers and founders from Google, Facebook, Nuance and others, and the product is optimized for long, human-to-human conversations such as meetings, lectures and interviews. Otter has formed partnerships with companies including Zoom and Dropbox and is partnering with NTT DOCOMO to enter the Japanese market. The company is piloting Otter in Berlitz English classes and will be demonstrated at DOCOMO Open House 2020. Otter plans to use new funding to hire engineers and further develop its AI capabilities in speech recognition, diarization, speaker identification and automatic summarization while accelerating enterprise adoption in professional services, media and education. AISense develops Ambient Voice Intelligence, a platform that combines automatic speech recognition, speaker identification and separation, speech-and-text sync, deep content search, and natural language processing. The company powers transcription for the Zoom platform and says Zoom is licensing its core technology. AISense plans to ship a consumer product in early 2018 to let users store, search, share and analyze voice conversations. Founded in early 2016 and based in Silicon Valley, the team includes engineers and Ph.Ds from Google, Yahoo!, Nuance and top universities. CEO Sam Liang, the founder, previously sold Alohar Mobile to Alibaba. To date the company has raised $13 million in total funding.

Total raised

$70M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Feb 2021