Generative AI continues to be a big draw for VC investors, and one startup just raised a significant funding round to use the tech for meeting summaries and other workplace tasks.
The startup, Read AI, closed a $21 million Series A funding round in April. Goodwater Capital led the round, with participation from existing investor Madrona Venture Group, which led the startup’s $10 million seed round in 2021.
Founded in 2021, the Seattle-based startup uses generative AI to provide automated summaries, transcripts, playbacks, and highlights for video meetings on platforms including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet.
With its new round of funding, Read AI rolled out new features for email and messaging, where the startup’s tech provides AI-generated topic reports, called Readouts, that update throughout the day and alert users to project updates, summaries to email threads, key action items, and timelines.
David Shin, who co-founded Read AI alongside Robert Williams and Elliott Waldron, told Business Insider that the generative AI boom over the last year has supercharged what the startup can offer clients.
“The concept of ‘connected intelligence’ where each email, meeting, and message is an independent AI agent that can collaborate to eliminate busywork wasn’t possible in the early days of Read,” he said, adding that this is why the startup initially focused just on meetings.
“As AI and the infrastructure that supports it have advanced, so have the opportunities to apply our solution to a broader audience,” he said.
Read AI offers multiple pricing plans, including a basic, free version for individual users as well as enterprise and enterprise plus accounts that cost $22.50 and $29.75 a month per user, respectively.
Since the launch of ChatGPT nearly a year and a half ago, AI has been having a big moment, with generative AI — which focuses on letting computers create brand-new outputs rather than just analyzing historical data — driving much of the hype. Some AI companies are showing signs of weakness, however, while leaders in the space are beginning to question if the industry has finally become over-hyped.
Even so, there are still opportunities for many AI startups to raise funding — sometimes at huge valuations, including AI search engine Perplexity, which just raised $63 million at a $1 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported.
At the early stage, legal-tech gen-AI startup Robin AI raised $26 million in January, while Superintelligent — which helps people learn how to use various AI tools — landed $2 million in pre-seed funding earlier this month.
Check out the 23-slide presentation Read AI used to raise $21 million in Series A funding.
