AI notetaker Fathom raises $17M

In many meetings today, it sometimes feels like there are more AI notetaking and transcription bots than people. There are seemingly dozens of options to choose from these days, but one I’ve seen with increasing regularity is Fathom. The company was one of the earlier players when it launched in 2020. Fathom then raised a $4.7 million seed round in early 2022 and, today, the company announced its $17 million Series A round, led by Telescope partners. Notably, $2 million of the $17 million came from Fathom users via crowdfunding on Wefunder.

The company says its revenue increased by 90x and usage by 20x over the last two years. That was likely from a relatively low baseline, but while the company didn’t share exact active user numbers, Fathom, which offers a generous free plan, did say that more than 8,500 companies now use its HubSpot integration.

“We always built Fathom around the expectation that AI would get really good,” the company’s CEO and co-founder Richard White told me. “When we started in 2020, AI wasn’t there yet. But we were like: Hey, we’re going to really focus on the things that we think are hard, which is getting distribution, building a really reliable infrastructure, and an easy-to-use product, with this expectation that when AI gets there, we’ll be able to drop that into this already widely distributed easy-to-use product, and it’ll just make it go from good to great.”

One thing that always made Fathom stand out is that the company relies on its own models — or at least its own fine-tuned versions of open models. Fathom has its own team working and experimenting with models — and as White noted, working with models is very different from typical engineering projects.

“Their output is not a feature, it’s actually spec,” he said about this team. “And it has a failure rate. It’s not like engineering, where you put something on the roadmap, it gets done. It’s like 50% time right now. If it’s not good enough, let’s check back in six months. I think it required rethinking the product development process a little bit.”

Over time, the team added a number of new features, including automatically creating action items and drafts for follow-up emails, as well as the “Ask Fathom” chatbot and more features geared towards teams. Most of these more advanced features are gated behind its paid plans, which start at $19/month on its monthly plans.

While most of the large meeting services are starting to offer their own takes on what Fathom is doing, White doesn’t seem to be too worried about that. “Our vision is that we want to get all of your meetings in one place,” he said. That broader vision, he said, includes becoming the central source of intelligence for a company’s leadership, something that’s hard to do when you only support a single meeting platform.

Part of this vision — and something the new funding round will help Fathom to work on — is to not just help its users with meeting notes and action items, but also with a lot more of the busy work that follows a meeting. It’s starting down this path with its automated action items and follow-up email features, but the idea here is to build more integrations and use AI agents to perform more of these tasks and directly interface with CRM systems, for example.

White also noted that there is a lot of data in meetings that isn’t currently being used and that may provide more ambient intelligence to leadership teams over time. Nobody can sit in on every meeting, after all, but White envisions a more proactive system that can alert decision-makers when a sales team, for example, is confronted with a question that they don’t have a good answer for, or when the name of a competitor suddenly becomes more prevalent in meetings.

I’ve taken Fathom for a spin in a few meetings this week and have generally been impressed by the quality of its transcriptions but especially by its meeting summaries. Where some other tools (looking at you, Otter) seem to try to shoehorn every meeting into a somewhat rigid flow that seems to be mostly geared toward users in sales, Fathom simply presents a useful summary that smartly creates chapters for every meeting.

Below is the summary of my interview with Fathom. The only mistake here is that we did not set up a follow-up meeting.