Fireflies.ai, an artificial intelligence startup that helps to transcribe words spoken during meetings into texts, co-founded by a Nigerian, has raised $5 million in seed round led by Canaan Partners along with former executives from Slack, Salesforce, Dropbox, Skype and other investors.

‘‘Our mission at Fireflies is to unlock knowledge from conversations and enhance meeting collaboration. To make that happen, we want to bring a voice assistant into every meeting in the workplace,’’ the startup said in a statement.

Here Is The Deal:

• This round of funding was led by Canaan Partners. Other participating investors included April Underwood and Bill Macaitis from the cloud-based team collaboration tool Slack; Aston Motes and Armando Mann from file storage and sharing company Dropbox; Sandhya Venkatachalam, Vice President of Corporate Development at Skype and Cisco; Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Segment; and Susan Kimberlin, Director of Search at Salesforce.
• The new round of funding will be used to scale the startup’s engineering team and machine learning efforts.
• The B2B-focused startup, which is easing the task of minute-making for corporate meetings, was founded in 2016 by Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong.
• The startup said it is spread out across 9 locations in 4 different countries.

Why The Investors Invested

According to Rayfe Gaspar-Asaoka, Principal Partner, West Coast at Canaan Partners, the investment came because Fireflies is changing the way enterprises think about meetings by integrating with and connecting to the video and voice conferencing platforms used to automatically record, transcribe, and structure the conversational voice data, allowing participants to easily share key decisions and collaborate on follow-ups.

‘‘I have had the pleasure of knowing Krish and Sam, the two co-founders of Fireflies.ai for a few years now, and we are thrilled to lead their Seed round and welcome them and the Fireflies team to the Canaan family. We are excited for the opportunity to partner with them to change the way organizations work, starting one meeting at a time,’’ Gaspar-Asoka said. 

Fireflies is not only solving a universal pain point within companies, but by capturing and structuring the conversational data from meetings, they are building a repository of previously unstructured data that was never before stored. The Fireflies platform enables users to search back at past meetings with others, see what key decisions were made, and allows employees to more effectively prepare for future interactions. Being able to store, structure, and use data from past meetings will allow a company to move faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Canaan Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in startups with transformative ideas.

Read also: Kenyan Startup Twiga Foods Raises $30 Million Led By Top US bank Goldman Sachs 

A Look At What Fireflies.ai Does

Fireflies is changing the way enterprises think about meetings by integrating with and connecting to voice conferencing platforms. Fireflies.ai joins any meeting app such as web-conferencing platforms Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, GoToMeeting, Webex and many more systems. 

Fireflies then transcribes and produces quick summaries of your meeting, all letting you be present for the meeting itself. Summaries are then automatically sent real-time to all call participants for seamless next steps. Overtime, your call records can be searched like a chat logs.

Instead of spending time frantically taking notes in meetings, Fireflies users take comfort knowing that shortly after a meeting they are provided with a transcript of the conversation and an easy way to collaborate on the project going forward.

Unlike other mediums of communication, the information from meetings is completely lost the moment you leave the meeting room. It’s not automatically documented and there is no way for people to refer back to what was said, the startup notes in a statement. 

We are the bridge that helps data flow seamlessly from your communication systems to your system of records.

Fireflies can also sync all vital information back into the places where you already work thanks to robust integrations with Slack, Salesforce, Hubspot, and other platforms.

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world