Read AI, an AI startup, has recently secured $21 million in funding from Goodwater Capital and Madrona Venture Group, marking a significant boost for the company.
With this new injection of funds, Read AI is set to double its team from 20 to over 40 employees in the near future, according to CEO and co-founder David Shim.
This move comes on the heels of the company’s success with AI-generated summaries for online meetings, indicating a promising trajectory for growth.
Broadening Horizons with New Features
Expanding its arsenal, Read AI introduced “Readouts,” a free service providing AI-generated recaps of email conversations and messaging threads.
Initially compatible with platforms like Gmail, Outlook, Teams, and Slack, Readouts aims to simplify user experience by condensing extensive email exchanges and message threads into concise summaries.
Although each Readout is currently limited to summarizing conversations within a single platform, plans are underway to enable cross-platform summaries, contingent on user permissions.
This innovation sets Read AI apart from its competitors, including in-built tools from giants like Microsoft, Google, and Zoom.
By offering a service that works seamlessly across different platforms, Read AI is not just enhancing user productivity but is also placing itself as a pivotal player in the AI field.
Behind the scenes, Read AI’s technology is designed to quickly adapt to users’ interests, promising to pinpoint and summarize the most pertinent topics within 24 hours of account linkage.
The company boasts that, on average, its Readouts can distill 50 emails involving 10 recipients or 56 message threads with seven participants into a singular, coherent topic.
While Read AI remains tight-lipped about its revenue and user statistics, Shim reveals that both the company’s revenue and the number of meetings summarized have doubled between December and February.
Furthermore, over the past year, Read AI has seen a twelvefold increase in monthly active users.
The Series A funding round, led by Goodwater with contributions from existing investor Madrona, sees Goodwater’s Coddy Johnson joining Read AI’s board alongside Shim and Madrona’s Matt McIlwain.
To date, including a $10 million seed round back in September 2021, Read AI has raised over $32 million.
Beyond funding, Read AI has been proactive in enhancing its service offerings. In December, the company rolled out new features such as meeting scheduling, an AI product manager, a Q&A function for recurring meeting questions, and a “daily read” audio digest summarizing key meeting highlights.
Founded in 2021 by Shim, Elliott Waldron, and Rob Williams, who previously led Placed—a location analytics startup acquired by Snap for over $200 million in 2017—Read AI is on an ambitious path to revolutionize how we interact with digital communication, making it simpler, more efficient, and crossing platforms seamlessly.
