Airgram, a Singapore-based company specializing in voice transcription, announced recently that it has closed its Series A funding round, having raised $10 million, as it prepares to launch in the North American market.
The company was founded in 2020 and has since racked up a handful of accolades, including Product Hunt’s #1 Product of the Day earlier this summer. The company aims to improve meeting productivity by transcribing and timing virtual meetings over platforms like Zoom and Google Meet. The company’s Series A round of funding was led by GL Ventures, and included investments from Linear Capital, CDH Capital, and PKSHA SPARX Algorithm Fund.
Launched at the peak of remote work’s prevalence during the COVID-19 pandemic, Airgram — which brands itself as Notta in Japan — launched in Japan about a year ago and has accumulated a base of roughly 500,000 unique users there. The company is currently gearing up to provide its transcription services to an English-speaking audience.
Airgram allows users to automatically transcribe meetings in real-time, as well as offering a Chrome extension for users to transcribe audio output from their browser. Users can also implement a timer in their meetings, to help them avoid going over time. The app has generated some media buzz as potential competition for the meeting transcription and productivity app, Otter.ai, which also raked in major investments during the pandemic, raising $50 million in Series B back in February 2021.
However, it’s too soon to tell if Airgram actually poses a threat to Otter.ai, which is already well-established throughout the world and claims to have transcribed more than 100 million meetings worldwide.
Similar speech technology has gained traction recently. This summer, MultiLingual reported on two speech recognition startups raising their own hefty sums of funding. Sanas, a Palo Alto startup, raised $32 million in Series A, while in the UK, Speechmatics earned $62 million in Series B. Unlike Otter.ai and Airgram, these companies more specifically emphasize inclusivity in their speech recognition software, with Speechmatics boasting its ability to transcribe text in a wide range of dialects and accents within an individual language.
