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Today I am excited to announce Canaan’s investment in Fireflies.ai. We led the seed round and were joined by angels and early employees from Dropbox, Slack, and Salesforce.
Let’s face it. We spend a lot of time in meetings. Imagine if following any meeting, you automatically sent a summary of action items – you could even reference a full transcript of the meeting if needed. The same information is available to people who couldn’t join the meeting. It all happens automatically – thanks to accurate voice transcription software and AL/ML – and there’s a convenient space for additional collaboration outside of a physical meeting space. That’s what Fireflies.ai provides.
Current trends suggest our modern workplace needs this solution. The average worker spends 5 hours a week in meetings, and 4 hours preparing for them. And those numbers are only increasing as workforce hiring continues to become increasingly more global and remote, and the proliferation of virtual conferencing solutions like Zoom, WebEx, Google Meet and UberConference make setting up a meeting one click away.
But there’s a good reason why we spend so much time in meetings; they are valuable. Whether it is a weekly internal check-in between the product and engineering team to align on objectives or a sales call with a prospective customer, meetings are where important conversations take place and where key decisions are made. However, despite today’s ease of creating and starting a meeting across time zones and locations, the way that we capture, store, and index the voice and conversational data from meetings is either still largely manual (through human note taking) or lost all together. On average 50% of the information is lost as soon as we leave the meeting, and even if we take notes, they don’t always capture the right context. And to complicate it even further, follow-ups and next steps often happen across multiple platforms (slack, email, phone, another meeting), making it difficult to keep track of the collaboration.
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. By automating the manual note-taking process, removing information mismatch and the dreaded game of workplace ‘telephone’, Fireflies will dramatically increase the overall efficiency of decisions and productivity of meetings within an organization.
Outside of workplace/culture trends, Fireflies also benefits from technology trends. As Amazon, Google and Apple compete to be the connected solution in households, customers are already very familiar with voice-powered technology. As the amount of voice data explodes, speech transcription – powered by Deep Learning – has made rapid improvements and the cost of transcription has fallen dramatically. 90+ accurately rates are now standard. This enabling trend allows Fireflies to build a robust, enterprise-ready platform while leveraging the virality of meetings through their freemium approach (ie, depending on user settings, all meeting attendees get a meeting readout regardless of it they are Fireflies users).
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.
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.