Superhuman is joining the cadre of productivity platforms launching notetakers — but rather than building one internally, it is acquiring Y Combinator-backed Fathom.
AI-powered productivity platforms aim to automate work. Typically, that automation is triggered when a user types prompts and creates workflows. It would be even better, however, if AI could proactively start work, and for that, the topics and action items discussed in meetings are key. Hence the desire by Superhuman and similar platforms to move into notetaking.
To date, Fathom, which was founded in 2020, has raised over $30 million in funding, and it was valued at $94 million in 2024, according to data from PitchBook. Its investors include Zoom Apps Fund, Telescope Partners, BoxOne Ventures, and Maven Ventures. Its cap table also includes individuals such as Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt.
The notetaker offers a generous free plan, and that has resulted in over 400,000 monthly active users. The company said that over 1 million people have recorded meetings until now.
TechCrunch learned that earlier this year, Superhuman tested a notetaker internally with select users, but eventually chose to acquire a finished product to integrate with its productivity suite, with AI at the center. Shishir Mehrotra, Superhuman’s CEO, acknowledged this; he said that in the process of testing, the company realized how hard it is to create a notetaker.
“We’ve been working internally on this area for a while as well. I think it greatly increased our confidence in the demand in this category. It also becomes very clear how deep the products in this category are and how much you need to build. A lot of these products make the job feel really easy, but it’s actually quite tricky to do a great job in all parts [of meeting recording],” Mehrotra told TechCrunch over a call.
Mehrotra said that he was impressed with some of the technical intricacies built by the Fathom team, but didn’t elaborate on which ones. He did tease that with a notetaker, Superhuman can work on surfacing meeting context in real time.
Competition in the meeting notetaker space is intense, and startups like Granola, Read AI, and new entrant Wispr have raised millions of dollars to aid that growth. Despite having a healthy customer base or revenue run rate, venture-backed notetakers are feeling the heat from the market to do more than just notetaking. Some of these factors did matter in Superhuman acquiring Fathom, while Fathom’s CEO Richard White said that Superhuman’s 40 million user base was a good opportunity to reach users at scale.
“The reach of Superhuman is massive. I have always thought about M&A in terms of speed of building a product that everyone uses, and a part of that comes down to distribution. If we were to operate Fathom as a stand-alone company, we would have to build a lot of things that are already in the Superhuman platform,” he said.
On the platform front, Superhuman already has an email client, a docs app, a calendar, a database solution, and a newly launched AI agent builder platform. With a meeting notetaker in the middle, Superhuman can draft emails, update data entries, schedule follow-up meetings, and have AI agents start work and extract insights from meeting data.
