Superhuman is joining the ranks of productivity platform executives launching Notetakers, but rather than building the platform in-house, it’s acquiring Y Combinator-backed Fathom.
AI-powered productivity platforms aim to automate work. Typically, that automation is triggered when a user enters a prompt to create a workflow. However, it would be even better if AI could actively start working, and to that end, the agenda and action items discussed at meetings are important. So Superhuman and similar platforms want to move into note-taking.
Founded in 2020, Fathom has raised more than $30 million in funding and is valued at $94 million in 2024, according to PitchBook data. Investors include Zoom Apps Fund, Telescope Partners, BoxOne Ventures, and Maven Ventures. That cap table also includes people like Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt.
notetaker offers a generous free plan, resulting in over 400,000 monthly active users. The company says more than 1 million people have recorded meetings so far.
TechCrunch has learned that earlier this year, Superhuman tested Notetaker internally with some users, but ultimately opted to have a finished product integrated with its AI-centric productivity suite. Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra confirmed this. He said that during the testing process the company realized how difficult it was to create a note taker.
“We’ve been working on this space internally for a while, and I think this has given us a lot more confidence in the demand for this category. It’s also made it very clear how deep the products in this category are and how much we need to build. A lot of these products make the job feel very easy, but it’s actually very difficult to do a great job in every part[of meeting recording],” Mehrotra told TechCrunch over the phone.
Mehrotra said he was impressed with some of the technical complexity that the Fathom team has built, but he did not elaborate on what it is. He teased that the Notetaker would allow the superhuman to surface the context of a meeting in real time.
Competition in the meeting note-taking space is fierce, with startups like Granola, Read AI, and newcomer Wispr raising millions of dollars to help them grow. Despite maintaining a healthy customer base and sales volume, venture-backed note takers are feeling the heat in the market for doing more than note-taking. While some of these factors were important to Superhuman’s acquisition of Fathom, Fathom CEO Richard White said Superhuman’s 40 million user base was a good opportunity to reach a large audience.
“Superhuman’s impact is enormous. I’ve always thought about M&A in terms of the speed of building products that everyone uses, and part of that comes down to distribution. If we were to run Fathom as an independent company, we would need to build a lot of things that are already on the Superhuman platform,” he said.
On the platform side, Superhuman already has an email client, document app, calendar, database solution, and a newly released AI agent builder platform. Superhumans can center meeting note takers, draft emails, update data entries, schedule follow-up meetings, and let AI agents go to work to extract insights from meeting data.
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