Read AI, an artificial intelligence startup, recently raised $21 million in funding from Goodwater Capital and Madrona Venture Group. This funding will help expand the company’s feature set to include AI-generated summaries of email conversations and messaging threads, in addition to its existing AI-generated summaries of online meetings. The company plans to double its team size to more than 40 people in the short term.
Competitors of Read AI include built-in tools from platform companies such as Microsoft, Google, Zoom, and others, but Read AI aims to differentiate itself by working across platforms. The new email and messaging recaps, called “Readouts,” will be available for free and work with Gmail, Outlook, Teams, and Slack messages. Read AI’s intelligent AI agents work behind the scenes to automatically identify and summarize topics or conversations across multiple messaging threads.
Each Readout will initially be limited to one platform, but in the future, reports will be able to identify and summarize topics across multiple platforms if the user provides access. The company’s technology learns which topics are most relevant to users within 24 hours of connecting an account by analyzing emails, messages, and channels. On average, a Readout condenses 50 emails across 10 recipients or 56 message threads across seven participants into a single topic.
While Read AI does not disclose specific revenue figures or user metrics, the company has seen significant growth in recent months. Revenue doubled between December and February, as did the total number of meetings measured and summarized for users in that time frame. Monthly active users have increased 12-fold over the past year. The new Series A funding round was led by Goodwater, with existing investor Madrona, and will help the company continue to expand and develop its features.
With the recent funding, Read AI has raised more than $32 million to date, including a $10 million seed round in September 2021. The company was founded in 2021 by David Shim, Elliott Waldron, and Rob Williams, who previously led location analytics startup Placed, which was acquired by Snap for over $200 million in 2017. New features introduced in December include meeting scheduling, an AI product manager, a Q&A feature, and a “daily read” audio digest of key highlights from meetings. The company’s growth and continued development show promise for its future success in the AI space.
