Otter.ai raises $320M in funding for its AI meeting assistant

Otter.ai raises $320M in funding for its AI meeting assistant

Otter.ai Inc., the developer of a popular artificial intelligence meeting assistant, today announced that it has raised $320 million in funding.

The capital came entirely from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. The investment vehicle provides startups with financing for sales and marketing initiatives. General Catalyst doesn’t take a stake in portfolio companies, but instead receives a share of the revenue that it helps them generate.

Otter.ai’s AI assistant is accessible through desktop and mobile clients. Users can launch it before a call to access information about the topics on the agenda. If a salesperson is preparing for a product pitch, Otter.ai might flag features in which the prospect expressed interest during previous meetings. The platform also pulls relevant data from external services such as HubSpot.

Otter.ai transcribes meetings with the help of an AI-powered speaker recognition engine. The feature organizes transcripts in a format that shows who said what. Furthermore, Otter.ai adds in information from any slides or screen sharing sessions that may have appeared on users’ screens.

The platform pairs every transcript with a one-page summary that outlines the topics the meeting covered and key action items. Otter.ai organizes the files that it generates by topic, team, project to make them easy to find. A built-in search engine enables users to retrieve specific items with natural language prompts.

Otter.ai can sync the data that it generates to external services via a set of ready-to-use integrations. It supports more than a dozen popular cloud services including Snowflake, Jira and OneDrive. An MCP server enables users to make Otter.ai files available to chatbots such as ChatGPT.

Otter.ai offers its core feature set alongside role-specific tools. Salespeople can generate follow-up emails to leads and automate the task of booking product demos. Teachers, in turn, have access to a tool that generates study guides based on lecture transcripts.

Otter.ai offers its service in a free tier and three paid editions. The top-end Enterprise version includes dashboards that enable managers to track trends across customer conversations. A sales executive, for example, could use Otter.ai to monitor how often leads mention a competitor. The Enterprise version also includes an expanded set of access controls and a single sign-on feature.

Otter.ai says that its platform has over 40 million users worldwide, including employees at more than 86% of the Fortune 500. Reuters reported that the company hopes to at least double its enterprise business over the next year. Otter.ai plans to achieve that goal by tripling its sales and marketing budget.

Photo of Otter.ai founders Sam Liang and Yun Fu: Otter.ai