SAN FRANCISCO — Headroom, a meeting platform leveraging artificial intelligence to improve communications and productivity, has raised a $9 million investment led by Equal Opportunity Ventures with participation from Gradient Ventures, LDV Capital, AME Cloud Ventures and Morado Ventures. The capital brings total funding to date to $14 million and will be used to expand Headroom’s team, product development and mobile offering.
The company also recently added new Shareable Automatic Summaries to its suite of tools for remote and hybrid meetings, furthering its mission to support balanced, entertaining, productive and memorable meetings.
Virtual meetings have become the de facto method for gathering, connection and collaboration. According to Fortune Business Insights, the meeting collaboration market is expected to exceed $41 billion by 2029. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of conversations at work will be recorded and analyzed, enabling the discovery of added organizational value or risk. Yet despite the increase in meetings, productivity and engagement rates are down. Even before the start of the pandemic, a Harvard Business Review survey revealed 65% of senior managers felt meetings kept them from completing their own work and 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. Smarter meetings may be the biggest opportunity for improved work productivity and satisfaction.
“The more meetings held, the more time wasted, with too many people spending time in redundant meetings. Headroom is leveraging AI to help companies do more with less, enabling individual workers to be more productive, choose which meetings to attend and which to watch later, or just quickly get the key pieces of information discussed,” said Julian Green, CEO and Co-Founder of Headroom. “Particularly in this environment, where for startups every dollar and every meeting minute counts, those that can move faster and stay better connected with people wherever they are, in real time and asynchronously, will win.”
Headroom is self-learning; its relevance and impact on productivity improves with use. Headroom data shows 90% of every meeting lacks useful information. To maximize the 10% meeting content that is helpful, the company developed Shareable Automatic Summaries which auto-generate highlight reels that provide key moments, shared notes and action items, and enable easy sharing with others. Additional platform functionality that maximizes synchronous and asynchronous communication includes:
- Live Interactive Transcripts: Everything captured and transcribed in shared team notes; keep up if you get distracted or couldn’t hear, and clarify miscommunications as they happen.
- Real-Time Engagement Analytics: Quantify participant engagement with real-time wordshare, affecting computing and eye tracking; to give all participants a chance to engage to ensure more equal and diverse meetings.
- Full Meeting Replays: For those who want more than the highlight, skip around with full replay, highlight participants or screens, choose 1-2x speed.
- Search Everything: Retrieve key moments or search by attendees, notes, or topics discussed; find context around a decision or find a key piece of forgotten information.
- In-Meeting Gestures: Give spontaneous feedback by doing what comes naturally: a thumbs up, thumbs down, wave, raise hand, facepalm, etc.
“Hybrid work is here to stay and virtual meetings are the norm, but they allow for a wide margin of distraction,” said Roland Fryer, Founder and Managing Partner at Equal Opportunity Ventures and newly appointed Headroom Board Member. “Headroom at its core is an engagement and productivity platform – streamlining collaboration and information sharing, without a heavy lift. It saves time in scheduling, reporting and collaborating.”
