As the landscape of startups offering speech-to-text services continues to expand, meeting transcripts have emerged as a common offering. Various tools now provide AI assistants that can either join meetings or capture system audio to transcribe and summarize them. One such company is Circleback, backed by Y Combinator, which aims to stand out by offering detailed notes and action items along with the ability to automatically gain insights from transcripts.

Revolutionize Meeting Management with Circleback

Company Founding and Initial Focus

Circleback was founded in 2023 by Ali Haghani, a former Stripe engineer, and Kevin Jacyna, a former Tableau engineer. They initially built a meeting tool that served as a searchable knowledge base, initially providing only notes and action items to participants. As Haghani explained to TechCrunch, they wanted to go in a different direction from tools like Otter and Fireflies. Instead of making users go back and read transcripts, they aimed to gather all the important information from a meeting in one place.Over time, the company focused on developing the tech stack to extract the best knowledge from meetings. Taking good notes became a key growth engine as people started using the tool for this purpose.

Product Features and Functionality

Circleback is a cross-platform app available on Mac, Windows, and the web. Users can have the assistant join their meetings or record audio from their systems. After each meeting, detailed notes with different sections and key points mentioned by speakers are provided. If desired, users can also access the transcript and recording. The tool also generates action items for all participants.However, Haghani acknowledged that general notes didn't suit the needs of all customers. So, they rolled out an automation feature that extracts certain insights from every meeting based on the user's prompt. Users can input information like customer details and add it to a Notion database or CRM. Creating automations is similar to making IFTTT recipes or Siri Shortcuts.The overarching idea is to enable users to obtain different kinds of knowledge and insights from the same meeting and then search across all meetings over time. Competitors like Read AI, which raised $50 million in Series B funding, are also trying to create tools to capture information across different surfaces to build an overarching knowledge base.

Positioning and Future Plans

Circleback has grown organically, with thousands of paying customers using its product. It is cashflow positive, and despite heavy investor interest, the founders didn't raise more money to avoid diluting their stake.Haghani recognizes the competition in the meeting intelligence space but believes the startup can find a good product-market fit. He emphasized that the conversational data is a gold mine, and by adding integrations, they can provide more trustworthy sources of data and knowledge for customers.The company is also considering allowing users to create templates for automation and share them with the community. Additionally, it plans to release iOS and Android apps soon to capture in-person conversations.