The key facts

  • Otter.ai received $320 million from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund — non-dilutive financing, repaid via a share of marketing spend results
  • The company previously surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), with 40 million total users versus 25 million a year earlier
  • Prior to this deal, the company had raised $50 million over nearly a decade; the meeting-notes market is highly competitive

A major non-dilutive deal

Meeting notes service Otter.ai announced on Tuesday that it raised $320 million from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund (CVF). According to TechCrunch, this fund provides startups with capital without diluting equity, earning returns as a share of the results of marketing spend. The company said it will use the funds for enterprise growth, its go-to-market strategy, international expansion, and product innovation.

Company metrics

Otter.ai has been around for nearly ten years and, according to PitchBook, had raised a total of $50 million before this deal, with its last round taking place in 2021. Last year the company crossed the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) mark; it has not disclosed new figures, saying only that it is approaching new milestones. The product's user count reached 40 million — up from 25 million a year earlier. However, the startup did not disclose monthly active user or churn data, which, as TechCrunch notes, is important given the high competition in the segment.

Competition and strategy

The market for meeting notetakers is crowded: it includes well-funded Fireflies.ai, Granola, and Read AI, newer players like Calendly, Wispr, and Superhuman (which acquired Fathom), as well as Circleback, Talat, and Quill. Most services aim to connect to enterprise systems and automate workflows based on meeting data; Otter is moving in the same direction — it has introduced a meeting assistant, search across multiple apps, and integrations with other AI tools.

Views and product plans

Pranav Singhvi, partner and co-founder of General Catalyst's CVF, said that voice is one of the largest untapped opportunities in enterprise AI, and that Otter helps turn voice data into actionable business insights. The company's new CMO, Alex Gay, who previously worked at Superhuman, told TechCrunch at the HumanX conference that the company sees a big opportunity in turning transcripts into action plans for people stuck in back-to-back meetings: in his words, meetings are 'terribly inefficient' because the first twenty minutes are spent recapping the previous discussion. Otter is testing features that provide insights before, during, and after meetings: a pre-brief with context from past conversations and Live Assist, which lets users ask an AI assistant questions right during a meeting.