Circleback Innovates AI Notetaking

On average, executives spend nearly 23 hours a week in meetings. As such, it comes as no surprise that the use of AI assistants to transcribe meetings is becoming increasingly common. Circleback, a Y Combinator-backed startup, wants to differentiate itself from other AI assistants by providing automatic insights based on the transcript of the meeting, while producing detailed notes and action items.

Founders Ali Haghani and Kevin Jacyna aimed to go beyond creating a tool that only provided a transcript. The initial idea came from the co-founders’ observation that much of the useful information shared in meetings is lost or quickly forgotten. Haghani told TechCrunch, “We were going in the opposite direction to tools like Otter and Fireflies. We didn’t want you to go back and read the transcript. We wanted to get everything that mattered to you from that meeting in one place.”

The company raised $2.5 million in a seed round, and investors are excited about the startup’s potential. Investor Kulveer Taggar saw the value in Circleback’s features, stating, “Meeting transcriptions are commonplace now, but Circleback’s value lies in the way it collates notes, actions items, and next steps. When I saw meeting notes after using the tool, it felt like there was a human editor at play who curated key points.” The AI integrates into work calendars, which makes it easy to add the Circleback bot to meetings and includes an AI copilot that can answer questions about past meetings.

Circleback plans to release iOS and Android apps to apply its technology to in-person conversations. Given the company is already cashflow positive, Circleback has not done any subsequent raises so as not to dilute the founders’ stakes – despite significant investor interest.