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Headroom, a startup that makes AI-powered software to make meetings more efficient, has announced that it has raised $9 million in funding led by Equal Opportunity Ventures with participation from Gradient Ventures, LDV Capital, AME Cloud Ventures and Morado Ventures. CEO Julian Green said the proceeds will be used for product development and expanding the company’s workforce.
During the pandemic, virtual meetings have become a means of collaboration and communication – both internally and in the workplace. The pace is not slowing down. A 2020 IDC report predicts that the video conferencing market will grow to $9.7 billion by 2021, with 90% of North American businesses likely to spend heavily on it. But in an interview with TechCrunch, Green argued that for most companies today, video conferencing cannot replace the intimacy of small, focused meeting groups. According to a Harvard Business Review survey, 65% of senior managers say meetings keep them from getting their work done, and 64% say they result in a loss of “deep thinking.”
“Legacy video conferencing players are struggling to innovate in the disruptive shift from client-centric messaging architectures to low-latency, hardware-accelerated, cloud-based real-time AI in real-time communication streams,” Green said in an email. “Slow rollout of AI features (e.g. captions, noise cancellation) has been observed, despite the recognition that all AI features are demanded by users and that virtual meetings are the future.”
Alongside Andrew Rabinovitch, Green launched 2020 Headroom (not to be confused with Max Headroom) to address what he believes are outstanding partners in the video conferencing industry. Greene was previously director of Google’s Experiment X division and director of Houzz, an online interior design platform. Rabinovitch was the head of AI at Magic Leap, a well-funded augmented reality startup, and before that he was a software engineer at Google focusing on computer vision.
“[We] It wanted to enable remote work by making meetings smarter and meeting data useful,” Green said. “Headquarters competes with fragmented video conferencing and conferencing devices where people stick together to join, take notes, and send meeting notes…Having a shared institutional meeting memory reduces meeting duplication. , and repetition is a huge drag on organizational productivity and employee happiness.”
Headroom uses AI to power features like automatic transcripts and meeting summaries, which can be indexed after meetings with search filters for attendees, notes, and topics. The platform offers full meeting replays and auto-generated highlight reels of key moments and action items, plus AI-powered augmentation and quick responses like “thumbs up” and “wave” that participants can use during meetings.
But one of the most unique things about Headroom is its extensive analytics capabilities. The application attempts to measure “real-time meeting energy” by analyzing video, audio and text from various attendees. It even tracks eye movements and hand and head positions, trying to sense the emotion in a person’s exchange.
Image Credits: Main room
Sound a little dystopian? in case. Putting that aside for a moment, there is the issue of bias, which makes sentiment analysis an imperfect science at best. For example, research shows that the datasets used to develop some sentiment analysis algorithms associate words like “black” with negative emotions. The result was that they were more likely to label a black person’s speech with problematic descriptors (eg, “tragic”) than a white person.
Advocacy groups are generally not bullish on sentiment monitoring. When Zoom introduced a feature for sales training, 28 human rights organizations wrote an open letter to the company calling for the software to be discontinued, calling it “discriminatory, deceptive.” [and] It can be dangerous” – and suggesting that it is based on the false assumption that cues like voice patterns and body language are the same for all people.
On the privacy front, Green said that only those who have been granted access to the analytics data, like other meeting attendees or those with the appropriate permissions, can access it through Headroom. (The data is stored in the cloud; Headroom says it’s pursuing SOC 2 Type II certification, but it doesn’t have it yet.) Meeting organizers can further restrict meeting information to invitees, and perhaps most importantly – any user can. Ask for their data to be deleted “in all forms”.
Green said that fighting discrimination is a broad but ongoing area of research for Headroom. While it didn’t say much about Headroom’s sentiment analysis technologies, the platform highlighted its efforts to use meeting participant feedback to improve its various algorithms, including meeting summaries.
“[Headroom quantifies] Leveraging real-time word sharing, computing and eye tracking to give all participants the opportunity to participate to ensure more equal and diverse meetings,” Green said. It uses intuitive bias to capture moments.”
Headroom policies may not allay potential user fears. But one could argue that the biggest threat to the company, at least for now, is household name rivals like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Zoom. Nvidia threw its hat into the ring two years ago with Maxine, which makes heavy use of AI to deliver features like noise cancellation and face lighting. At the other end of the spectrum, startups like Fireflies.ai and Read.ai are taking the plug-in approach, integrating with existing video conferencing platforms to drive meeting transcripts and other “intelligent” features.
Image Credits: Main room
With a focus on growth over profit, San Francisco-based Headroom, which has 14 employees, has been a free-to-use and storage space since its inception. Green says it currently has about 5,000 users — far fewer than Zoom’s hundreds of millions. But he stressed that (1) Headroom isn’t necessarily trying to compete with platforms like Zoom, preferring to focus on the small to mid-sized business space, and (2) it’s early days for the platform.
“The global pandemic, remote work, and now the integrated workforce have shown us everything wrong with meetings. If your company has a return to work policy, remote teams will need better meetings and the ability to search, review and share meeting information, Green said. “The Headroom team did a full test [the pandemic] How to make meetings better for remote teams, and flexible for virtual, hybrid, in-person, synchronous and asynchronous. A hybrid workforce is the new normal, so Headroom will continue to provide a platform that improves where and how people work.
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