Read AI, a Seattle startup that applies artificial intelligence to online meetings, is expanding beyond its automated recaps of single meetings — using AI to summarize and glean insights from potentially thousands of meetings at a time.
The company, founded in 2021 by a trio of Seattle tech vets, is attempting to get ahead in its competition against corporate giants and an array of startups in one of the most hotly contested AI fields.
David Shim, Read AI CEO and co-founder, compares the new approach to reading interconnected chapters in a book, rather than single magazine articles, leveraging the larger context of multiple meetings to unlock additional value.
This broader approach, which ReadAI calls “Large Meeting Models,” or LMMs, is the basis for several new features that the company is releasing Wednesday:
- A scheduler that uses AI to suggest the best days and times to hold a meeting based on engagement and sentiment scores from past meetings.
- An AI project manager that automatically identifies, tracks, and updates the status of action items based on discussions and interactions during meetings.
- A Q&A feature that discovers and answers common questions from thousands of meetings across an organization.
- A “For You” page in which content is automatically selected by learning which topics interest individual users, based on AI-generated assessments from meetings they attend.
- A new “Daily Read Podcast,” an AI-produced audio digest that provides users with personalized summaries from relevant meetings held during the prior 24 hours, and previews their upcoming meetings.
The daily audio recap was a skunkworks project developed in just the past few weeks after the idea came up, demonstrating the potential to build new features rapidly under the new approach. The idea is to give Read AI users the ability to hear an overview on a commute to work. Here’s an example.
The new features build on the company’s existing AI tools, which are centered around a post-meeting recap that summarizes individual meetings, along with a transcript and video highlights, an approach that has been compared to “SportsCenter” for meetings.
Read AI works with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, with a subscription pricing model. The company says its AI has analyzed more than 100 million minutes of meetings so far. Zoom selected Read AI as an Essential App, Google made Read AI a launch partner for Meet Add-Ons, and Microsoft also highlighted the startup.
Some of the same tech giants are offering their own tools that use AI to analyze meetings on their own platforms, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, promising to compete more and more with Read AI and other startups over time.
At the same time, Read AI is increasingly seeing interest from larger customers with thousands of users. This is leading to faster growth than the startup saw in its early days of product-led growth, when individual users and smaller groups of workers were the primary early adopters, Shim said.
“We are excited about where we’re at,” he said. “It’s still early days, but we’ve found product-market fit when it comes to meetings. Now the market is telling us, these are the things we want you to add on top of it, versus us having to go in and guess.”
The company was founded in 2021 by Shim, Elliott Waldron, and Rob Williams. The group previously led location analytics startup Placed, which was acquired by Snap for more than $200 million in 2017.
Read AI raised a $10 million seed round in September 2021.
The startup’s technology, including its AI models, is developed primarily in-house.
