In lots of conferences right now, it typically looks like there are extra AI notetaking and transcription bots than individuals. There are seemingly dozens of choices to select from as of late, however one I’ve seen with growing regularity is Fathom. The corporate was one of many earlier gamers when it launched in 2020. Fathom then raised a $4.7 million seed spherical in early 2022 and, right now, the corporate introduced its $17 million Sequence A spherical, led by Telescope companions. Notably, $2 million of the $17 million got here from Fathom customers through crowdfunding on Wefunder.
The corporate says its income elevated by 90x and utilization by 20x during the last two years. That was seemingly from a comparatively low baseline, however whereas the corporate didn’t share precise energetic person numbers, Fathom, which affords a beneficiant free plan, did say that greater than 8,500 corporations now use its HubSpot integration.
“We always built Fathom around the expectation that AI would get really good,” the corporate’s CEO and co-founder Richard White advised me. “When we started in 2020, AI wasn’t there yet. But we were like: Hey, we’re going to really focus on the things that we think are hard, which is getting distribution, building a really reliable infrastructure, and an easy-to-use product, with this expectation that when AI gets there, we’ll be able to drop that into this already widely distributed easy-to-use product, and it’ll just make it go from good to great.”
One factor that at all times made Fathom stand out is that the corporate depends by itself fashions — or a minimum of its personal fine-tuned variations of open fashions. Fathom has its personal staff working and experimenting with fashions — and as White famous, working with fashions may be very completely different from typical engineering initiatives.
“Their output is not a feature, it’s actually spec,” he stated about this staff. “And it has a failure rate. It’s not like engineering, where you put something on the roadmap, it gets done. It’s like 50% time right now. If it’s not good enough, let’s check back in six months. I think it required rethinking the product development process a little bit.”
Over time, the staff added various new options, together with mechanically creating motion objects and drafts for follow-up emails, in addition to the “Ask Fathom” chatbot and extra options geared in the direction of groups. Most of those extra superior options are gated behind its paid plans, which begin at $19/month on its month-to-month plans.
Whereas many of the giant assembly companies are beginning to supply their very own takes on what Fathom is doing, White doesn’t appear to be too fearful about that. “Our vision is that we want to get all of your meetings in one place,” he stated. That broader imaginative and prescient, he stated, consists of changing into the central supply of intelligence for an organization’s management, one thing that’s onerous to do while you solely assist a single assembly platform.
A part of this imaginative and prescient — and one thing the brand new funding spherical will assist Fathom to work on — is to not simply assist its customers with assembly notes and motion objects, but additionally with much more of the busy work that follows a gathering. It’s beginning down this path with its automated motion objects and follow-up electronic mail options, however the concept right here is to construct extra integrations and use AI brokers to carry out extra of those duties and straight interface with CRM methods, for instance.
White additionally famous that there’s a lot of knowledge in conferences that isn’t at the moment getting used and that will present extra ambient intelligence to management groups over time. No person can sit in on each assembly, in any case, however White envisions a extra proactive system that may alert decision-makers when a gross sales staff, for instance, is confronted with a query that they don’t have reply for, or when the identify of a competitor immediately turns into extra prevalent in conferences.
I’ve taken Fathom for a spin in just a few conferences this week and have usually been impressed by the standard of its transcriptions however particularly by its assembly summaries. The place another instruments ( you, Otter) appear to attempt to shoehorn each assembly right into a considerably inflexible movement that appears to be largely geared towards customers in gross sales, Fathom merely presents a helpful abstract that well creates chapters for each assembly.
Under is the abstract of my interview with Fathom. The one mistake right here is that we didn’t arrange a follow-up assembly.
