Virtual Meeting Platform Vowel Closes $13.5M

Funding to be put towards product development and team growth

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Virtual Meeting Platform Vowel Closes $13.5M
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Published: September 8, 2021

Sandra Radlovački

Sandra Radlovački

Virtual meeting platform Vowel announced that it raised $13.5 million in a Series A round led by Lobby Capital, bringing the company’s total capital raised to $17.8 million.

According to a source, during the pandemic, videoconferencing saw a 535% rise in daily traffic. In an era of hybrid, flexible, and remote work, the virtual meeting software market is expected to reach $41.58 billion by 2027.

Headquartered in New York, Vowel is a videoconferencing platform that offers a range of planning, hosting, transcription, search, and sharing tools. For in-person setups, it uses each meeting attendee’s microphone to capture audio, providing an ostensibly higher-quality audio signal with less noise and accidental echo. Vowel also combines multiple data sources and metadata tagging within a meeting to identify any key points and context.

Andrew Berman, Co-Founder and CEO, Vowel, told Venturebeat: “Every company is navigating new ways of working, whether people have returned to the office, are continuing to work from home, or both. Hybrid work needs new tools and so there’s more interest than ever.”

“Our goal is to make meetings more inclusive and worthwhile — before, during, and after. That means focus on the entire lifecycle of meetings — the prep before, the conversation during, and the follow up after. Our growing team is building features to facilitate this process, and we’ll be shipping quickly this fall and beyond.”

Vowel competes against heavyweights like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet in a crowded market, but what sets it apart from others is that it uses AI to solve common videoconferencing problems. During hybrid meetings, Vowel intelligently coordinates devices with each other using digital signal processing techniques and beamforming to improve the accuracy of speech-to-text and speaker identification.

Vowel also says it’s working on AI-powered meeting summaries that will leverage the platform’s existing ability to analyse agenda items, user-written notes and action items, emoji reactions, comments, screen sharing content, and meeting transcripts. Currently, key points from meetings are organised into discrete topic buckets that group related concepts together.

 

 

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