Seattle startup Read AI raises $50M to fuel ‘copilot everywhere’ vision for enterprise software

Read AI is on a roll.

The Seattle startup, which sells enterprise productivity software tools fueled by generative AI, is adding 100,000 new accounts each week and has 75% of the Fortune 500 using its products. And it hasn’t spent a single dime on marketing.

The 3-year-old company announced a $50 million Series B round to accelerate growth — just six months after announcing a separate $21 million round.

“We’re growing faster than we ever thought we would,” said CEO David Shim.

New York-based Smash Capital, a new investor, led the round. Previous backers Goodwater and Madrona also invested.

Read launched in 2021 and initially positioned itself as a software tool to measure engagement and sentiment of participants on video meetings, riding pandemic-driven adoption of tools such as Zoom. It later added meeting summarization tools.

But the company’s vision goes beyond just meetings. Read can now analyze emails and messaging threads, in addition to video calls — and suggests action items based on its analysis of information shared across communication channels.

The focus is on building a “copilot everywhere” that works across various platforms, said Shim.

For example, Read can take a meeting summary from a sales call on Zoom and push it into a CRM service such as HubSpot.

Or, it can add context to a Gmail or Outlook thread by surfacing related conversations from Slack or Microsoft Teams, and create drafts based on previous email threads or video meetings with a particular recipient.

Shim sees a path toward being able to offer customers predictive analytics based on the data it is analyzing, and automate how information is shared within an organization.

“We’re focusing on the ability to integrate with as many services as possible,” he said.

Shim said part of his company’s growth comes from individual users who try the product for free, find value in it, and then get their colleagues on board.

Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona, said Read’s traction reminds him of another enterprise software company that his venture capital firm backed.

“They are similar to Smartsheet in the early years as they acquired essentially all of these customers without having a sales rep and they are seeing strong evidence of ‘land and expand’ patterns with customers,” McIlwain said.

Read charges between $15 to $40 per user, per month. It also offers a free tier. Shim did not reveal revenue metrics. The company is not profitable.

Read AI’s competitors include built-in tools from platform companies such as Microsoft, Google, Zoom, and others. Its tools work with those platforms, but Read is aiming to differentiate itself in part by working across platforms.

There are also a number of startups building similar meeting summary tools, such as Otter, Seattle-area startup Alice, and Fathom, which just raised $17 million.

Investors are pouring gobs of cash into AI startups, betting on a technological wave that some say will be bigger than the internet.

Competition is fierce, not just from up-and-coming early stage companies but also established tech giants building their own AI models and products, particularly in the enterprise sector.

There are various tools aiming to make employees more efficient, though it’s up for debate in regard to actual value being offered thus far.

Bradley Twohig, managing partner and co-founder at Smash Capital, said his growth-stage firm takes a selective approach to investing in AI startups, making sure that there is an “enormous amount of value” being provided to customers.

“The kind of scale and retention of the user base at Read was quite impressive,” said Twohig, who joined Read’s board.

Twohig added: “The number of products and people investing in things that are akin to what Read looks like today is more indicative of the scale of the market, more than anything else.”

Read has about 40 employees and plans to double its headcount next year. Total funding to date is $81 million.

Shim and his co-founders — Elliott Waldron and Rob Williams — previously worked at location analytics startup Placed, which was acquired by Snap for more than $200 million in 2017.