There are now many startups with AI bots that will listen in on your meetings, transcribe them, take notes, and generate insights. This means companies in this space need to differentiate themselves by offering additional feature sets and integrations.

Read AI, startup founded by former Foursquare CEO David Shim with Rob Williams and Elliott WaldronIt integrates its co-pilot into email, Slack, and enterprise tools like Hubspot, Jira, and Confluence, so it can learn more about a particular project or your conversations with a particular client across apps.

To accelerate product development, the company raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Smash Capital, with participation from existing investors Madrona and Goodwater Capital. It’s especially notable that the Series B fundraiser came just six months later. beginning raised $21 million in Series A.

Shim told TechCrunch that after the raise earlier this year, the company saw high customer growth momentum, with more than 100,000 new accounts created across the board. The company used these numbers to raise another round.

” We exceeded even our most aggressive projections by doubling our registrations, active users, and MRR in less than six months. “We are now using this momentum to build and ensure we can accelerate growth with a partner who shares our vision of an AI co-pilot everywhere, delivering value not only to businesses but to consumers at scale.”

Shim did not specify Read AI’s valuation but said it received an upgrade in valuation to match its growth in this round.

Brad Twohig, co-founder and managing partner of Smash Capital, said he typically looks for companies with product-led growth when investing, and Reads fits that mold well.

“I like to find companies in spaces that both appeal to a broad range of people and also have an enterprise component,” he told TechCrunch in a call.

Product development

Read AI launched integration with email, messages and meeting apps earlier this year. The company is releasing a Chrome extension today that can display your scheduling link, your latest meeting reports, a quick add to meeting option, and suggestions, which are insights from meetings.

The extension can also highlight important points for a long topic. It can also help you create an outline, keeping all emails, messages, and meetings across platforms in context. Like other email clients Short-wave And Superhuman also has these abilities.

What’s more, the extension can also highlight memos from meetings or Slack messages on the same topic in an email thread.

Read AI offers its Chrome extension for free. Shim noted that the latest fundraiser is another reason to develop and scale products like this and offer them for free.

“No matter where you work, we’re pushing for more, we’re shooting that content, we’re giving you summaries, we’re giving you advice. It’s a bigger opportunity, but there’s a bigger cost center associated with it. Therefore, we are focusing on growing this market while maintaining our leadership on the meeting notes side,” said Shim.

Read AI’s game gives you more information and insight into a particular conversation, topic, or project by integrating different services and having large language models that make sense of all that text.

Smash Capital’s Twohig believes meeting minutes have become a commodity, but Read AI’s approach of distributing its copilot everywhere could turn it into a good business.

“We encountered Read AI as an assistant attending meetings and taking notes. But when we sat down with David, we understood the broader vision and concept of having a co-pilot everywhere. This tool can follow you through daily tasks, keep useful records, and provide better It can allow you to be teammates.”

Read AI currently has 40 people on its payroll, and the company aims to increase that number to 100 people by the end of the first quarter of 2025.