In lots of conferences at this time, it generally appears like there are extra AI notetaking and transcription bots than folks. There are seemingly dozens of choices to select from nowadays, however one I’ve seen with rising 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, at this time, the corporate introduced its $17 million Collection A spherical, led by Telescope companions. Notably, $2 million of the $17 million got here from Fathom customers by way of crowdfunding on Wefunder.
The corporate says its income elevated by 90x and utilization by 20x during the last two years. That was probably from a comparatively low baseline, however whereas the corporate didn’t share precise energetic consumer numbers, Fathom, which affords a beneficiant free plan, did say that greater than 8,500 corporations now use its HubSpot integration.
“We all the time constructed Fathom across the expectation that AI would get actually good,” the corporate’s CEO and co-founder Richard White informed me. “Once we began in 2020, AI wasn’t there but. However we have been like: Hey, we’re going to essentially give attention to the issues that we predict are laborious, which is getting distribution, constructing a extremely dependable infrastructure, and an easy-to-use product, with this expectation that when AI will get there, we’ll have the ability to drop that into this already extensively distributed easy-to-use product, and it’ll simply make it go from good to nice.”
One factor that all the time 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 group working and experimenting with fashions — and as White famous, working with fashions may be very completely different from typical engineering tasks.
“Their output just isn’t a function, it’s truly spec,” he stated about this group. “And it has a failure fee. It’s not like engineering, the place you set one thing on the roadmap, it will get completed. It’s like 50% time proper now. If it’s not ok, let’s examine again in six months. I believe it required rethinking the product growth course of somewhat bit.”
Over time, the group added a lot of new options, together with robotically 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 a lot of the massive assembly companies are beginning to provide their very own takes on what Fathom is doing, White doesn’t appear to be too nervous about that. “Our imaginative and prescient is that we need to get all your conferences in a single place,” he stated. That broader imaginative and prescient, he stated, consists of turning into the central supply of intelligence for a corporation’s management, one thing that’s laborious to do whenever you solely help 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 e-mail options, however the thought right here is to construct extra integrations and use AI brokers to carry out extra of those duties and instantly interface with CRM programs, 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 group, for instance, is confronted with a query that they don’t have reply for, or when the title of a competitor all of a sudden turns into extra prevalent in conferences.
I’ve taken Fathom for a spin in a number of conferences this week and have usually been impressed by the standard of its transcriptions however particularly by its assembly summaries. The place another instruments (taking a look at you, Otter) appear to attempt to shoehorn each assembly right into a considerably inflexible movement that appears to be principally 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.
