B2B-focussed and AI-based mobile communication startup Fireflies has raised $5 million (approx INR 35 crore) in its first round of funding from Canaan Partners, slew of individual investors, reported Inc42.
The Hyderabad and San Francisco-based startup will utilise the infused financial to strengthen its machine learning and infrastructure teams and will be ramping up hiring for the same.
“We will also be growing our engineering team in India, specifically Hyderabad and Bengaluru,” Krish Ramineni, CEO and founder at Fireflies, said.
Fireflies was started by Krish Ramineni in 2016. As per Fireflies official LinkedIn page, the Artificial intelligence (AI) assistants have changed the face of mobile communication for consumers and now, B2B-focussed Fireflies is looking to bring similar intelligence to enterprise meetings and communication.
The company Fireflies uses a voice-based AI assistant for meetings on phone calls and brings assistant like note-taking features, improves collaboration by automatically capturing, transcribing and sharing the important information from meetings to team members.
Ramineni further said that Fireflies uses custom deep learning models to improve the ability to detect voice and transcribe with greater accuracy.
“The power of AI is that the more conversations that our system trains on the smarter it gets,” he added.
“There is an incredible amount of engineering talent and the startup ecosystem is rapidly expanding in Hyderabad,” Ramineni further said.
Furthermore, a study by Accenture revealed that AI could add $957 Bn to the Indian economy with the potential to increase the country’s total income by 15% by 2035. Investors and large corporates have also shown the appetite to partner with such tech startups to stay ahead of the curve as tech penetration and adoption increases.
Besides Fireflies, other startups under the similar roof include Zapier, Slack, Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, among others.