Participated · Series B · Aug 2023

Founded in 2015 by Dr. David Ferrucci, Elemental Cognition offers a generative AI platform that combines large language models with a variety of other AI techniques. The company holds a patented platform and positions its offerings across two primary use-case categories: research & discovery and expert assistance. Its solutions target industries including life sciences, financial services, travel & logistics, higher education, and government. Elemental Cognition plans to use recent funding to support commercial growth of its platform. The company emphasizes solving the hardest problems by blending multiple AI approaches rather than relying solely on standalone LLM outputs. No operating metrics (revenue or users) are disclosed in the article.

Participated · Series A · Feb 2018

Otter (formerly AISense) provides AI-powered speech-to-text transcription that turns conversations and meetings into searchable text and identifies who is speaking. The platform supports both consumer and enterprise customers and integrates with partners such as Dropbox and Zoom in the U.S. Otter began operating in 2018 and has been piloting use cases in Japan, including Berlitz's online English classes where students can search lesson recordings. The company’s Otter Voice Meeting Notes app helps users find portions of recordings without manual review. Otter is expanding into Japan through a partnership with NTT DOCOMO to integrate its transcription tech into DOCOMO’s Mirai Translation service. Financially, Otter closed a $10 million funding round and, according to the article, has raised $23 million since it was founded. Otter is a voice-transcription product built by AISense that records conversations on iOS, Android and web, automatically transcribes them, and syncs audio with searchable text. The company built its entire speech-recognition stack in-house and uses diarization and voice prints to separate and identify multiple speakers. Transcripts are stored encrypted in the cloud and the app supports file uploads, sharing, and a tag-cloud UI to jump to frequently used words. AISense has licensed its transcription technology to Zoom but says its immediate monetization focus is not licensing; it plans an enterprise version with more controls and a premium tier for consumers. A future release is intended to support recording phone calls. The team is led by Sam Liang and includes engineers from Google, Facebook, Nuance, Yahoo and researchers from Stanford, Duke, MIT and Cambridge.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2017

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.