Generative AI is a buzzword in the tech industry. Not surprisingly, VC firm Sequoia predicted that generative AI, which consists of AI that can generate text, art, and more from prompts, could create trillions of dollars of economic value over the long term. . Is it just optimism for companies investing heavily in this space? Maybe. Generative AI, on the other hand, has proven to be the taste of labor.
Supernormal hopes to demonstrate the value of generative AI with technology that integrates with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other meeting platforms to create meeting notes. There are many vendors in the meeting notes transcription space, which has exploded during the pandemic when work-from-home setups have become the norm. It differentiates itself by extracting important details from meetings, such as decisions and decisions.
It’s a strong sell. Supernormal today announced that he has raised $10 million in a funding round led by Balderton, with participation from Acequia Capital and Founders VC. The new cash brings the company’s total funding to about $12.9 million, which co-founder and CEO Colin Treseler said will be used for product research and development and hiring.
“Currently, Supernormal has a small team of 5 people and plans to grow to 25 people by the end of 2023. Mainly engineering, marketing and [customer] Treseler said in an email interview with TechCrunch. “The new funding will be used to advance our mission to deliver end-to-end workflow his solutions based on fundamental meeting data and to develop next-generation tools that deliver action and insight from conversations across the organization. will be
Supernormal automatically transcribes and summarizes meetings.
Treseler co-founded Supernormal with Fabian Perez, whom he met 13 years ago while working at a company funded by Balderton. (Treseler’s also held the role of product manager at Meta, was chief of staff for risk management at Klarna, and Perez was his director of design at GitHub.) In 2020, the two talked about what to build next. We brainstormed. After long sessions, they realized that there were no notes from the conversation, and that well-documented discussions would be critical to their success.
“At an organizational level, our meetings are an important part of our work output. Who would watch an hour-long meeting again?” says Treseler. “Especially for product-he-managers, team-he-leaders, and client-facing teams, we hear this product is especially transformative because it makes it easier to track important updates and milestones.”
To that end, Supernormal’s platform, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, creates meeting and call notes across templated categories such as “presentations,” “customer discovery calls,” and “interviews.” According to Treseler, Supernormal distills details such as the customer’s objectives and goals, and then attempts to automate action items such as following up with him via email, scheduling, and making referrals after the meeting.
Supernormal is self-learning. As users edit their notes, the quality of the notes they get on their next call will improve. However, you can also delete stored data if you choose for privacy reasons.
Image credit: super normal
“When a company signs a contract, team members are under constant pressure to meet deadlines and demonstrate value. ,” says Treseler. “It also reduces the pressure on employees to over-communicate and be transparent. Supernormal makes this easy. can stay connected.”
It should be noted here that the function of supernormal is not wonderful Novel, no pun intended. Competitor Otter recently published an AI-generated meeting synopsis. There’s also Headroom, tl;dv, Xembly, and Fireflies.ai to transcribe and highlight key meeting moments.
But Treseler claims Supernormal is more affordable than most solutions on the market, averaging less than $1 per meeting, and has already grown its paying customer base. He says his 50,000 users from more than 250 organizations, including Netflix, Airbnb and Snapchat, actively use the platform.
Supernormal’s secret is to achieve profitability given the high cost of relying on the OpenAI API. The most comprehensive GPT-3 plan costs about $0.02 per 750 words. This seems a lot, considering that a 30-minute meeting transcript can range from 3,000 to 6,000 words.
Another, more existential business challenge is remote workers’ desire to get away from frequent meetings. His July 2022 study by RedRex said employees spend an average of 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings. 71% believe work time is often wasted due to unnecessary or canceled meetings. Additionally, more than half of respondents said they would actively reduce the amount of time they spend in virtual meetings.
Treseler similarly admitted, he was hesitant to share Supernormal’s earnings numbers. But he believes growth is sustainable.
“As more companies move to hybrid or fully remote, Supernormal is becoming an essential tool for distributed teams,” continues Treseler. “We have seen explosive growth as teams try to understand hybrid or distributed models. As soon as one team her members are distributed, they need a meeting documentation tool. ”
