Vowel, a new flagship in the world of online conferencing tools, raises US$13.5 million in Series A
Virtual meeting platform Vowel announced today that it has raised US$13.5 million in Series A funding led by Lobby Capital. CEO Andy Berman said the funding brings the company's total funding to US$17.8 million, which will be used for product development and team expansion.
During the pandemic, daily traffic for video conferencing increased by 535%, according to one source. The virtual meeting software market is expected to reach US$41.58 billion by 2027, but its popularity belies the challenges of coordinating meetings in an era of hybrid, flexible and remote work. According to a study by Software One, poor meeting coordination costs more than US$399 billion annually.
New York-based Vowel is a video conferencing platform founded in 2018 by Andrew Berman, Ben Kempe, Matthew Slotkin and Paul Fisher to plan, host, transcribe and search for meetings. , sharing and other tools. For face-to-face meetings, each participant's microphone is used to capture voice, providing a high-quality voice signal with little noise or spurious echoes. Additionally, Vowel combines multiple data sources and metadata tags to identify key points and context for a meeting.
Berman said in an email to VentureBeat:
All businesses are exploring new ways of working, whether they are returning to the office, continuing to work from home, or both. Hybrid work requires new tools, and more interest than ever before. Our goal is to make meetings more inclusive and rewarding before, during and after meetings. This means we focus on the entire meeting lifecycle, including pre-meeting preparation, in-meeting conversations, and post-meeting follow-up. Our growing team is building features to facilitate this process, which we plan to release quickly starting this fall.
Vowel is competing in a crowded market with powerhouses like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Fireflies. But Berman says Vowel stands out from the rest by using his AI to solve common videoconferencing problems. For example, Vowel uses video analytics techniques such as face detection and OCR to identify relevant points in meetings and optimize videos to focus on participants. Hybrid conferencing also uses digital signal processing technology and beamforming to intelligently link devices together to improve the accuracy of transcription and speaker identification.
Vowel also leverages the platform's existing capabilities to analyze agenda items, user-written notes and action items, emoji reactions, comments, screen-shared content, meeting transcripts, and more to generate AI-powered meeting summaries. is said to be working on Key points of the conference are now organized into separate topic buckets that group together related concepts. In the future, we plan to provide dashboards with metrics that show trends across teams and specific meetings. This includes how references to different topics and projects have changed over time, spikes and stagnation of conference attendees, etc.
Vowel is still in private beta, but Berman said it has a waiting list of over 10,000 people. The company's immediate goal is to continue hiring in product, design and engineering, with a target of about 30 employees by the end of the year.
[via VentureBeat] @VentureBeat
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