Read AI
Headquarters
Seattle, WAFounded
2021CEO / Founder
David ShimEmployees
11-50Funding
Series B — $81MProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
7.8/10Website
read.ai/
Profile updated
About Read AI
Read AI is a meeting intelligence company founded in 2021 by David Shim and headquartered in Seattle, Washington. The company builds software that automatically joins video meetings to generate transcriptions, summaries, action items, and participant engagement metrics.
Read AI's primary product integrates with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and other conferencing platforms to capture meeting content and surface insights without manual note-taking. The platform tracks speaker engagement, sentiment signals, and talk-time distribution, and can generate post-meeting reports shared automatically with participants. The company targets knowledge workers, sales teams, and enterprise organizations seeking to reduce administrative overhead from meetings.
Read AI raised a $21 million Series A round in 2023, bringing its total disclosed funding to approximately $21 million. The company operates with a relatively small team and competes in a crowded market alongside Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Gong, and Microsoft's native Copilot meeting features.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Read AI
All products by Read AI reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Read AI
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Read AI's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.9 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Read AI competes with, and how they differ.
Otter targets a broader consumer/prosumer market with a freemium transcription-first product and deep native integrations across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, while Read AI leans more on cross-meeting engagement/sentiment analytics and has expanded into email and messaging summarization.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Fireflies emphasizes searchable transcript archives and CRM/Slack workflow automation at aggressive per-seat pricing aimed at sales and support teams, whereas Read AI differentiates on live in-meeting engagement scoring and coaching-style analytics.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Fathom offers a free-forever AI notetaker focused on Zoom call summaries and highlight clips with no enterprise analytics tier, competing on price against Read AI's paid engagement-analytics and admin-dashboard features.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Granola avoids sending a bot into the call, instead generating notes from the user's own typed shorthand plus system audio -- a privacy/UX angle that undercuts Read AI's historically bot-based recording model (Read only added a botless Google Meet option in 2026).
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
tl;dv positions on a generous always-free recording/transcription tier and GTM-team playbooks (call clipping for sales enablement), competing for budget-conscious teams that Read AI serves with tiered paid plans.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Avoma is built specifically for revenue teams with deal-conversation intelligence and CRM sync as its core loop, a narrower vertical focus than Read AI's cross-functional meeting/email/messaging assistant.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Read AI's history, with sources.
- Partnership
Became an official Claude Connector
Read AI became an official Anthropic Claude Connector, giving its 5M+ monthly users access to meeting transcripts, action items, and pre-built Skills directly inside Claude.
read.ai - Launch
Launched botless Google Meet integration
Read AI introduced the first botless integration with Google Meet, using Google's new Meet Media API to capture audio and video without a visible notetaking bot joining the call.
read.ai - Launch
Launched Ada, an AI email assistant ("digital twin")
Read AI launched Ada, an email-based AI assistant that manages scheduling, answers questions using company knowledge bases and web search, and drafts email responses.
techcrunch.com - Milestone
CEO David Shim named GeekWire CEO of the Year
Read AI co-founder and CEO David Shim was named CEO of the Year by GeekWire.
read.ai - Funding
Series B -- $50M led by Smash Capital
Read AI raised a $50 million Series B led by Smash Capital, with Madrona Venture Group and Goodwater Capital participating, and launched Read AI for Gmail. The company stated the round brought total funding to $81 million.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series A -- $21M led by Goodwater Capital
Read AI raised a $21 million Series A led by Goodwater Capital, with existing investor Madrona Venture Group participating, and expanded its product from meeting summaries into email and messaging intelligence. The company stated it had raised over $32 million to date.
techcrunch.com - Partnership
Became a Zoom Essential App
Read launched as a Zoom Essential App, giving Zoom customers 12 months of free access to its premium meeting-analytics and summary features powered by GPT.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Seed round -- $10M led by Madrona Venture Group
Read AI raised a $10 million seed round led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from PSL Ventures and angel investors, to build its real-time virtual-meeting engagement dashboard.
techcrunch.com - Founded
Read AI founded in Seattle by David Shim, Rob Williams, and Elliott Waldron
Founded in May 2021 by three Foursquare/Placed alumni: CEO David Shim, VP Engineering Rob Williams, and VP Data Science Elliott Waldron.
techcrunch.com
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