More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed software infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday that it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total to greater than $12 million.
The startup has built infrastructure and a unified API that enables companies to access raw data from virtual meeting platforms like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddles, Zoom, and even API-less platforms. With video and audio data, users can create conference bots or AI-powered applications corresponding to sales coaching, meeting note takers, or each day meeting bots.
Recall.ai says the latest capital will likely be used to grow the team and build integrations with more data sources. The two-year-old startup currently has nine employees and expects to have a team of greater than 16 by the end of this yr, David Gu, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
Gu and Recall.ai co-founder Amanda Zhu attended the University of Waterloo before dropping out to create a startup. “I studied software engineering while my co-founder studied computer science and business,” Gu said. “We left Waterloo when we were 19 to start a business together. I did Y Combinator when I used to be 19 years old.
The duo had previously worked on a real-time video conferencing transcription tool and had experience building integrations with video conferencing platforms and related infrastructure.
They launched Recall.ai in 2022 to address two critical trends – the shift to distant work around the world and the boom in generative AI – after witnessing the same problem other companies had with integrating AI tools.
“Enterprises are increasingly looking for ways to incorporate AI into their product offerings, and conversations are a huge data set where applying AI makes a lot of sense,” Gu suggested. “In 2022, more and more companies started building products using LLM [large language models] for processing videoconferencing data. However, each of these companies faced the same integration and infrastructure hurdles that we encountered and solved.”
“It takes at least a year of engineering time to build the infrastructure and integration in-house in its most basic form,” he continued. “Once built, companies face a greater challenge: hosting infrastructure requires hundreds or even thousands of servers to handle processing and a team of engineers to monitor, scale and maintain everything.”
Enterprises using Recall’s API and infrastructure don’t have to build that infrastructure themselves, which implies they will quickly and cost-effectively deploy latest AI-powered products and features, Gu explained, comparing it to how companies can leverage infrastructure cloud computing corresponding to AWS to scale your web applications. Recall.ai goals to provide a common infrastructure to any company that needs access to artificial intelligence and apply it to conversations, he added.
“Recall.ai provides the infrastructure layer that many of these companies rely on, just as these companies use AWS,” he suggested. “We have no competition because there are no other companies offering the same service, which is a development infrastructure for capturing and processing meeting data.”
When it comes to regulation, Recall.ai says yes SOC2, GDPR, CCPA AND HIPAA compliant and has no military or government contracts. Audio and video recordings are stored for a maximum of seven days, after which they are routinely deleted.
“We also provide an API endpoint so that users can instantly delete data at any time if they want to minimize data retention time,” Gu said.
The startup makes money by charging per hour for audio and video processing via APIs. Gu noted that in lower than two years, Recall.ai has increased annual revenue from zero to several million dollars, saying it now has greater than 300 enterprise customers, adding up to “millions” of users.
Over the last 12 months, the company has seen a 10x increase in revenue, he also told us.
Ridge Ventures led the Series A along with Industry Ventures, Y Combinator, Ir, Bungalow Capital, Hack VC and other existing investors.