AI Meeting Assistant Gains Unicorn Status With $1B Valuation
Fireflies.ai, the AI meeting assistant used by 75% of Fortune 500 companies, has reached a $1 billion valuation.
Co-founders Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong met while studying at the University of Pennsylvania and later at MIT, according to Tech Funding News. Udotong is a Nigerian American with a background in aerospace engineering and computer science. Ramineni, who is originally from India, worked at Microsoft before co-founding Fireflies.
What is Fireflies?
Fireflies enables workers to summarize key information from meetings. It currently serves over 20 million people and more than 500,00 organizations.
Its valuation also coincides with the launch of “Talk to Fireflies”, an interactive AI meeting companion that users can engage with via voice or chat in over 60 languages across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. It’s a collaboration with Perplexity, which will enable users to ask questions and receive real-time answers sourced from the internet, all without leaving their meetings.
“Meetings are where critical decisions happen, but they’re often information-poor environments. By integrating Perplexity’s search capabilities into Fireflies, we’re eliminating the need to switch contexts or postpone decisions as workers move to question-first problem-solving,” Dmitry Shevelenko, Chief Business Officer at Perplexity, said in a press release.
Fireflies’ valuation
Fireflies’ valuation growth comes from a tender offer rather than a traditional funding round, which provided liquidity to long-term employees. The company has remained profitable since 2023 and hasn’t raised primary capital since 2021, despite maintaining triple-digit year-over-year growth.
“We wanted to recognize our earliest employees who’ve been vital to Fireflies’ journey,” said Ramineni. “Reaching this significant valuation milestone while remaining profitable validates our approach to building an AI company differently from the conventional ‘raise big, burn fast’ playbook.”
Image: Fireflies.ai
