Artificial intelligence startup Read AI raised $21 million in new funding from Goodwater Capital and Madrona Venture Group, and expanded its feature set by adding AI-generated recaps of email conversations and messaging threads.
The announcements Tuesday morning are designed to set the stage for a new phase of growth at the 20-person company, building on its existing momentum with AI-generated summaries of online meetings. Read AI plans to grow to more than 40 people in the short term, said David Shim, CEO and co-founder, in an interview.
Read AI’s competitors include built-in tools from platform companies such as Microsoft, Google, Zoom, and others. Its tools work with those platforms, but Read is aiming to differentiate itself in part by working across platforms.
Its new email and messaging recaps, dubbed “Readouts,” will be available as a free service. The reports work with Gmail, Outlook, Teams, and Slack messages. Read AI says its intelligent AI agents work behind the scenes to automatically identify and summarize a topic or conversation even when it takes place across multiple messaging threads.
Initially, each Readout will be limited to one platform, such as Gmail or Slack. However, in the near future, individual reports will be able to identify and summarize a topic across multiple platforms, if the user provides access.
Read AI says its technology learns which topics are most relevant to users within 24 hours of connecting an account, by analyzing emails, messages, and channels. In initial usage, the company says the average Readout condenses 50 emails across 10 recipients, or 56 message threads across seven participants into a single topic.
The privately held company doesn’t disclose specific revenue figures or user metrics, but Shim said Read AI’s revenue doubled between December and February, as did the total number of meetings measured and summarized for users in that time frame. Over the past year, monthly active users increased 12-fold, the company said.
The new Series A funding round was led by Goodwater, with existing investor Madrona. Goodwater partner Coddy Johnson will join Shim and Madrona’s Matt McIlwain on the Read AI board.
Combined with earlier rounds, including a $10 million seed round in September 2021, the company has raised more than $32 million to date.
Read AI in December introduced new features including meeting scheduling, an AI product manager, a Q&A feature questions commonly asked across meetings, and a “daily read” audio digest of key highlights from meetings.
The company was founded in 2021 by Shim, Elliott Waldron, and Rob Williams. The group previously led location analytics startup Placed, which was acquired by Snap for more than $200 million in 2017.
