Generative AI is the current buzz of the tech industry. No wonder—the VC firm Sequoia long predicted that generative AI, capable of generating text, art and more from questions, would generate trillions of dollars in economic value in the long term. Is that simply the optimism of a company heavily invested in space? in case. On the other hand, the creative AI proved to be a labor of love.
Supernormal hopes to demonstrate the value of its technology through generative AI that creates meeting notes by integrating with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other conferencing platforms. There are many presenters at the conference, including a copy space, which exploded during the pandemic when working from home became the norm. But Supernormal distinguishes itself by extracting key details from meetings, such as tasks and decisions, by relying on OpenAI’s text-processing AI to do the summarizing work.
It’s a strong selling point. Supernormal today announced it has raised $10 million in a funding round led by Balderton with participation from Acequia Capital and Founders VC. The new cash brings the company’s total revenue to $12.9 million, which co-founder and CEO Colin Tresseler said is being used for product R&D and hiring.
“Currently Supernormal has a team of 5, which is expected to grow to 25 by the end of 2023 – mostly in engineering, marketing and [customer] Success,” Trezeler told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The new funding will be used to advance our mission to deliver end-to-end workflow solutions based on core meeting data and develop next-generation tools that deliver action and insights from conversations across the organization.”
Supernormal automatically copies and compiles assemblies.
Tresseler co-founded Supernormal with Fabian Perez, whom he met 13 years ago while working at a venture capital firm in Balderton. (Treseler’s also held product manager roles at Meta and chief of staff at Klarna’s risk management division, while Perez was director of design at GitHub.) In 2020, the two spent two weeks thinking about what to build next. After a long session, they realized that they had no notes from the talks and that well-recorded discussions would be critical to their success.
“At the corporate level, our meetings are an integral part of our work product, so far they’ve been stale or boring – who’s going to revive an hour-long meeting when keynotes are important?” Trezeler said. “Especially for product managers, team leaders and customer-facing teams, we’ve heard that this product will make a difference as it helps them easily track key updates and development milestones.”
To this end, the Supernormal platform, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, writes meeting and call notes into templated categories such as “presentation”, “customer discovery call” and “interview”. It pulls out mundane details like client objectives and goals, Treseler explains, and tries to automate action items like follow-up emails, scheduling and introductions after a meeting.
Supernormal is self-learning – when users edit their notes, they’re improving the quality of the notes they get on the next call. However, if you choose for privacy reasons, you can delete any stored data.
Image Credits: More than normal
“When companies enter into contracts, team members are constantly under pressure to hit deadlines and demonstrate value. A tool like Supernormal supports them at every step of the process and takes that administrative burden off them,” Trezler said. “It also puts pressure on employees to be hyper-communicative and transparent, and SuperNormal easily enables this – boosting productivity and helping everyone connect regardless of location and time zones.”
It is important to note here that they are not Supernormal abilities. Very good Fiction, no verse. Otter, a competitor, recently released AI-generated meeting summaries. There’s also Headroom, tl;dv, Xemly, and Fireflies.ai for documenting and highlighting key moments in meetings.
But Trazeler SuperNormal is more affordable than most solutions on the market — averaging less than $1 per session — and already has a growing customer base. 50,000 users across more than 250 organizations, including Netflix, Airbnb and Snapchat, are actively using the platform, he said.
Supernormal’s method will be to achieve profitability while considering the high cost of relying on the OpenAI API. The most comprehensive GPT-3 plan costs around $0.02 per ~750 words, which sounds like a lot – a 30-minute meeting transcript can range between 3,000 and 6,000 words.
Another, more pressing business challenge is the need to avoid frequent meetings among remote workers. According to a July 2022 survey from RedRex, employees spend an average of 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings. 71% believed that most of their work time is wasted due to unnecessary or canceled meetings. Moreover, more than half of the respondents said that they are actively interested in how much time they spend in virtual meetings.
Treseler admits as much — and is loathe to share Supernormal’s revenue numbers. But he believes the growth is sustainable.
Trezeler continues, “With many companies becoming hybrid or completely remote, Supernormal is becoming an essential tool for distributed teams. We’ve seen explosive growth as teams try to figure out the hybrid or distributed model. As soon as a team member is deployed, a meeting documentation tool is needed.
