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Read AI is on a roll. The Seattle startup, which sells enterprise productivity software tools fueled by generative AI, is adding 100,000 new accounts each week and has 75% of the Fortune 500 using its products. And it hasn’t spent a single dime on marketing.
The 3-year-old company announced a $50 million Series B round to accelerate growth — just six months after announcing a separate $21 million round. New York-based Smash Capital, a new investor, led the round. Previous backers Goodwater and Madrona also invested.
Read launched in 2021 and initially positioned itself as a software tool to measure engagement and sentiment of participants on video meetings, riding pandemic-driven adoption of tools such as Zoom. It later added meeting summarization tools. But the company’s vision goes beyond just meetings. Read can now analyze emails and messaging threads, in addition to video calls — and suggests action items based on its analysis of information shared across communication channels.
The focus is on building a “copilot everywhere” that works across various platforms, said CEO David Shim. For example, Read can take a meeting summary from a sales call on Zoom and push it into a CRM service such as HubSpot. Or, it can add context to a Gmail or Outlook thread by surfacing related conversations from Slack or Microsoft Teams, and create drafts based on previous email threads or video meetings with a particular recipient.
Shim sees a path toward being able to offer customers predictive analytics based on the data it is analyzing, and automate how information is shared within an organization. “We’re focusing on the ability to integrate with as many services as possible,” he said.
Read charges between $15 to $40 per user, per month. It also offers a free tier. The company is not profitable but is growing rapidly, with about 40 employees today and plans to double its headcount next year. Total funding to date is $81 million.
Investors are pouring gobs of cash into AI startups, betting on a technological wave that some say will be bigger than the internet. Competition is fierce, not just from up-and-coming early stage companies but also established tech giants building their own AI models and products, particularly in the enterprise sector.
Bradley Twohig, managing partner and co-founder at Smash Capital, said his growth-stage firm takes a selective approach to investing in AI startups, making sure that there is an “enormous amount of value” being provided to customers. “The kind of scale and retention of the user base at Read was quite impressive,” he said.