Productivity platform Lupine helps teams organize meetings • TechCrunch

Meetings are important to help teams stay connected, especially those that are remote or hybrid. But too many meetings can be counterproductive as shared information and action items get buried under everything else employees need to do. Productivity platform Loopin wants to help by integrating with work apps and collecting data from multiple meetings, making it easy to access and share. The Washington State-based startup announced today that it has gone out of stealth mode after eight months in which it has worked with 450 companies in the US.

The startup, backed by Venture Highway and angel investors, was founded in 2021 by college friends Anurag Verma, Parh Parekh and Mehul Dudi. Prior to Lupine, Varma was Product Lead at Venture Highway Upgrad, Parekh was Product Lead at Samsung and Dudi worked as Engineering Manager at Freshworks.

The initiative came about because the trio realized that their meeting hours had increased when the outbreak began, but the meetings were becoming more productive. They had trouble finding out what decisions and amendments had been made in the various meetings and matters of practice that needed to be done.

During the call, the founders “discuss the rabbit hole of ineffective meetings and how our work is fragmented by the number of apps we use at work,” Varma said. “This finally made us think what if we had a super-app that pulls data from all apps and provides us with the context we need at the right time – things to discuss in a meeting, pending tasks or follow-up – communicating with other team members. It frees up content on lower tasks.

An average organization uses more than 250 applications, Varma added, and each team uses 40 to 60, leading to data fragmentation. For example, a meeting’s lifecycle typically starts with a calendar invitation from another application that may have an agenda. During meetings, team members use various note-taking apps to write down takeaways and next steps, then share them via email and Slack, and create tasks in project management apps. This means that before the next meeting, each person has to look at several applications to prepare various tasks and confirm the situation.

“In short, the knowledge you create is disconnected from the assembly,” Varma said. “Which leads to decontextualization and productive, redundant conversations.”

To solve these problems, Loopin integrates with Slack, Zoom, GMeet, Gmail, Notion, Asana, Trello, Jira and other work apps. Features include a meeting management component that records meeting results and shares them with participants.

Notes are organized by meetings and previous discussions are revisited in future meetings, ensuring that important tasks are not lost. Meanwhile, Loop’s Tasks feature helps everyone keep track of their to-do items by adding tasks to their calendar. If you’re wondering how employees spend their time, you can check out Lopin’s calendar analytics. This means that all participants are up to date before the next meeting, which saves the entire group time.

As an example of what LoPin can do, Varma provides a few case studies. For example, a design agency uses Loopin to track client calls and share next steps internally at the end of each meeting. The platform tags functions to assemblies, so designers can easily find their context without needing to find each one.

Startup Accelerator Mentor uses Loopin to record training sessions, which are mostly ad-hoc, so Loopin helps by linking back to previous calls and viewing past conversations and action items. Meanwhile, an e-commerce company’s marketing team uses Loopin to make asynchronous updates, which means they can avoid status update meetings.

Varma says Lopin’s target customers are founders, senior executives and managers in executive roles who spend a lot of time in meetings, and general knowledge workers. The startup is currently pre-revenue. Its early beta users will be free for the next six months, then Loopin will operate on a freemium model starting in the second quarter of 2023. The Lopin team is currently working on APIs so users can build their own integrations.