Recall.ai, a Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup, raised an additional $10 million on Thursday. This brings the total amount of money the company has raised to over $12 million.
Companies can get raw data from virtual meeting platforms like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddles, Zoom, and even platforms that don’t have an API, thanks to the infrastructure and unified API that the startup has built. Users can use the video and voice data to create AI-powered meeting bots or apps like sales teaching, meeting note-taking, or daily standup bots.
The company Recall.ai said it would use the extra money to hire more people and connect to more data sources. David Gu, co-founder and CEO of the two-year-old company, told Eltrys that it plans to hire more than 16 people by the end of the year.Â
Gu and Amanda Zhu, co-founders of Recall.ai, both went to the University of Waterloo but dropped out to work for the company. The person who helped start my business studied business and computer science, whereas I studied software engineering. “When we were 19, we quit Waterloo to start a business together.” When I was 19, I did the Y Combinator.
The two had previously worked together on a real-time recording tool for video chats, and they knew how to build connections with videoconferencing systems and the infrastructure that goes with them.
They started Recall.ai in 2022 to react to two important trends: the rise of creative AI and the trend toward working from home around the world. This was because they saw other companies having the same problems they did when trying to integrate AI tools.
It makes a lot of sense for businesses to use AI in talks, which is why more and more companies are looking for ways to add AI to their products, Gu said. In 2022, more and more businesses began producing goods that used LLMs (large language models) to handle data from video conversations. But every single one of these businesses had the same problems with technology and connectivity that we had seen and fixed.
The expert said, “It takes a year or more to build the infrastructure and integrations in-house in their most basic form.” Once companies build the infrastructure, they face a significant challenge: maintaining it requires tens of thousands of servers and a team of engineers to monitor and maintain its updates.
When businesses use Recall’s API and infrastructure, they don’t have to build it themselves. This lets them add new AI-powered products and features quickly and cheaply, Gu explained, comparing it to how businesses can use cloud computing infrastructure like AWS to make their web apps bigger. He also stated that Recall.ai wants to provide every company with the same tools they need to reach out and use AI in conversations.
He said, “Many of these companies build on top of Recall.ai’s infrastructure layer, which is similar to how these companies use AWS.” “There aren’t any other companies that offer the same service as us, which is developer infrastructure to capture and process meeting data,” he said.
Compliance with SOC2, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA rules is what Recall.ai says, and the company doesn’t have any military or government contracts. Recall.ai retains sound and video records for a maximum of seven days before promptly deleting them.
Gu said, “We also give users an API endpoint that lets them delete the data right away at any time if they want to shorten the time we keep it.”
The business makes money by charging for each hour that its APIs handle voice and video. Gu said that in less than two years, Recall.ai’s yearly sales went from nothing to several million dollars. The company now has more than 300 corporate customers, bringing in “millions” of users.
He also told us that the business has made 10 times as much money in the last year.
Industry Ventures, Y Combinator, IrregEx, Bungalow Capital, Hack VC, and other current investors led Series A. Ridge Ventures was one of the lead investors.
