Otter.ai raises $320 million from General Catalyst’s growth fund for its meeting tool

Meeting note-taking tool Otter.ai announced on Tuesday that it has raised $320 million from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), which provides capital to startups without diluting equity and gets returns on the results of marketing spend.

Otter.ai said that it will use these funds for enterprise growth, go-to-market strategy, international expansion, and product innovation.

The startup, which has been around for nearly a decade, has raised $50 million in total funding with its last round in 2021, according to PitchBook data.

Last year, Otter hit a revenue milestone after crossing $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). The company said it’s now approaching new milestones, but didn’t provide updated figures.

The company said that 40 million users have used its product to date, up from 25 million last year. However, given the crowded space among meeting note-taking products, a pertinent challenge for Otter would be to have its customers stick around. Unfortunately, the startup didn’t provide any numbers around its monthly active users or churn.

“Voice is one of the biggest untapped opportunities in enterprise AI, and Otter is at the forefront of it – a conviction that’s only deepened watching Otter’s growth,” said Pranav Singhvi, Partner and Co-founder of CVF, General Catalyst. “When Otter enables enterprises to capture critical voice data and turns it into actionable business insights, teams move faster, decisions get sharper, and productivity compounds across the organization, and that’s why it’s a strong partner for CVF.”

There is a lot of competition in the market with well-funded meeting notetakers like Fireflies.ai, Granola, and Read AI; new entrants like Calendly, Wispr, and Superhuman, which acquired Fathom; and other notetakers like Circleback, Talat, and Quill.

Most of these notetakers want to connect to enterprise systems and, based on data captured in meetings, automate workflows. Otter is also heading in that direction. In the last few years, it introduced a meeting assistant, a search function that works across apps, and integration with other AI tools.

Otter’s newly appointed CMO, Alex Gay, who comes from Superhuman, told TechCrunch at a sit-down at the HumanX conference last month that the company sees a big opportunity in turning transcripts into an actionable roadmap for people who are in back-to-back meetings.

“When we start thinking about what is actually the bigger problem that people are facing right now, we saw this large pain point in meeting-heavy roles, where people are back-to-back in conversations. These meetings are the work for them. That’s either customer conversations or, from a sales standpoint. That’s where strategies are discussed. But meetings are terribly inefficient because when you come into a meeting, you spend the first twenty minutes recapping what was said before to catch everybody up,” he said.

The company is now experimenting with providing insights before, after, and during meetings. It has been testing a feature to send a pre-brief to users with details and background information, with context from previous conversations across surfaces. Plus, it is also trying out a Live Assist feature to let users ask questions to the AI assistant during the meeting to get knowledge.