Generative AI is the tech industry’s hottest topic, and it’s easy to see why. According to Sequoia, the AI technology that can generate text, art, and more from prompts could potentially generate trillions of dollars in economic value in the long run. While this may be an optimistic projection from a firm heavily invested in the space, generative AI has already proven to be a major labor saver.
Supernormal is looking to demonstrate the value of generative AI with its tech, which automatically transcribes and summarizes meetings from Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other conferencing platforms. The company can differentiate itself from other vendors in the meeting notes transcription space by extracting key details from meetings such as actions and decisions, relying on OpenAI’s text-processing AI to do the summarization work.
Today, Supernormal announced that it had raised $10 million in a funding round led by Balderton, with participation from Acequia Capital and founders VC. This brings the company’s total funding to around $12.9 million, which co-founder and CEO Colin Treseler says will be used for product R&D and hiring. Supernormal currently has a small team of five and expects to grow to 25 by the end of 2023, mainly in engineering, marketing, and customer success.
Treseler co-founded Supernormal with Fabian Perez, whom he met while working at a Balderton-funded company 13 years ago. With Supernormal, they hope to provide end-to-end workflow solutions based on foundational meeting data, and develop tools that can deliver actions and insights from conversations across the organization. Treseler explains that meetings are a significant part of work product that, until now, were ephemeral or too unwieldy to consume. This product is particularly transformative for product managers, team leads, and client-facing teams, as it helps them easily keep track of key updates and milestones.
Supernormal’s platform, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, can write meeting and call notes across templated categories like “presentation,” “customer discovery call,” and “interview.” It extracts details like customer objectives and goals, and attempts to automate action items like follow-up emails, scheduling, and making introductions. The platform is self-learning, as users edit their notes, they’re improving the quality of notes that they get in their next call, and they can delete any stored data for privacy reasons.
Supernormal is not the only player in the market. Otter recently rolled out AI-generated meeting summaries, and there’s also Headroom, tl;dv, Xembly and Fireflies.ai for transcribing and highlighting key moments in meetings. However, Treseler claims Supernormal is more affordable than most solutions on the market, and already has a growing paying customer base. 50,000 users across more than 250 organizations including Netflix, Airbnb, and Snapchat are actively using the platform.
The trick for Supernormal will be achieving profitability given the high cost of relying on the OpenAI API. And, of course, there’s the challenge of remote workers wanting to move away from frequent meetings. In a July 2022 survey from RedRex, workers said they spent an average of 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings, and 71% believed their work time was often wasted due to unnecessary or canceled meetings.
Treseler admits this is a real issue, but believes the growth is sustainable as more companies have gone hybrid or fully remote. Supernormal is becoming an essential tool for distributed teams, and a meeting documentation tool is needed as soon as one team member is distributed.
