Atlassian on Thursday introduced that it has acquired Rewatch, an AI-powered assembly notetaker, display recording instrument and video hub. The corporate plans to combine Rewatch into Loom, the asynchronous video messaging platform it acquired for $975 million final October. However perhaps much more importantly, it additionally plans to combine it into its lately launched Rovo AI platform in order that assembly notes can shortly develop into Jira points, for instance, and the transcripts develop into searchable inside the general enterprise context.
The 2 corporations didn’t disclose the value of the acquisition. Again within the heady days of early 2021, when all people was seemingly searching for higher video-centric options, Rewatch raised a $20 million Sequence A spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz. The corporate didn’t elevate any further funding since, in response to Crunchbase.
As Loom co-founder Joe Thomas instructed me in an unique interview forward of Thursday’s announcement, Loom already supplied an integration with Zoom to report conferences and create transcripts. However that solely felt tangential to what the corporate was attempting to do with Loom, he mentioned.
“It was value evolving our platform and bringing in nice IP from Rewatch to speed up our efforts there,” Thomas unhappy. “The rationale why we received so enthusiastic about Rewatch is the truth that we consider Atlassian is disproportionately positioned to take assembly recordings and maximize the worth of them. It’s because Loom already generates transcripts for each single video that’s created after which we layer all of the AI prompts round it — a part of Rovo is that it’s a unified search [platform] throughout an enterprise and it’s additionally constructing on high of it.”
Loom and Rewatch share a standard investor in Andreessen Horowitz; Thomas and Rewatch founder Connor Sears sometimes discovered themselves in the identical conferences a couple of years in the past. But it surely was Atlassian’s company growth staff that first met with Rewatch after which requested Thomas to fulfill up with the corporate, too.
Thomas believes that integrating Rewatch’s tech stack will really be fairly easy, particularly now that Loom has moved its stack over to the Atlassian platform.
The true problem now’s to offer the perfect person expertise, he mentioned. As soon as an agent joins a gathering, it has to know a variety of context; although this will probably be a human-in-the-loop system, it nonetheless has to get it proper more often than not. If it always suggests the unsuitable motion gadgets after a gathering, for instance, customers will shortly quit on it.
“Rovo and brokers is, I believe, comparatively technically complicated but in addition end-user complicated when it comes to, OK, if we’re speaking a few Confluence Doc, what elements of that am I updating? What is definitely useful for an finish person or assembly attendees to do on their behalf, from an AI agent perspective? That’s one thing that’s comparatively new for lots of us at Atlassian. … I believe that that’ll in all probability take six to 12 months to essentially lock in on that entrance, with a variety of experiments between from time to time,” Thomas mentioned.
One different Rewatch characteristic that Atlassian was particularly interested by is its calendar integration. The Rewatch staff made {that a} very easy expertise, the place customers can merely toggle the assembly bot on and off for every assembly. Rewatch additionally options a variety of automation options that, for instance, ship out the assembly notes to each attendee. Certainly, Thomas famous that whereas the Rewatch staff confronted a variety of challenges in constructing the product, constructing the calendar integration meant coping with extra edge instances and extra friction than constructing most different elements of the Rewatch stack.
As soon as the mixing is full, the Loom AI agent will be capable of be part of Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Groups conferences. It’ll create a full transcript, assembly notes and motion gadgets that it will possibly then routinely correlate to Confluence pages, Jira points and repair tickets.
He famous that Loom’s mission stays to empower efficient communication by way of video messages at work. Loom has over 31 million registered customers and 360 million movies dwell on the platform. Collectively, they’ve seen over a billion views. Clearly, that’s one thing Atlassian is attempting to lean into, however the firm can also be well increasing past this core characteristic of asynchronous messaging by a few of the different ways in which movies — and their transcripts — are generated inside a enterprise context.