Nigerian Founder Joins Partner to Raise $14 million for His AI Startup
- Khosla Ventures, Canaan Partners and some angel investors raised funds for Fireflies.ai
- The investors gave Fireflies $14 million in a series A funding, increasing the company's total fund to $19 million
- Fireflies.ai is a voice assistant which helps to take notes during videoconferencing
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A voice assistant, Fireflies.ai, which was co-created by a Nigerian, Sam Udotong, has raised $14 million in a series A funding which was led by private equity firm, Khosla Ventures.
The fundraising round was joined by Canaan Partners and some other angel capitalists. The new fund increases the investment that has gone into Fireflies.ai to $19million.
The AI voice assistant which takes note during videoconferencing had previously raised $5 million in October 2019, through a seed round, three years after it was founded.
Udotong had co-founded Fireflies.ai with Krish Ramineni. The AI startup helps transcribe a videoconferencing after an individual sends an invite to its email address, “fred@fireflies.ai” or allows Fireflies to auto-join calls via Google or Outlook calendar.
Source: Getty Images
After the videoconferencing, Fireflies sends a recording and transcript. It is used by 10,000 teams, but when the number is broken down by individual usage terms, about 35,000 organizations are amongst Fireflies user base.
According to Ramineni, who doubles as the chief executive officer, he said:
“When we first designed Fireflies, we wanted it to work with the ecosystem of tools that we use every single day. Fireflies connect to your calendar, and can even capture meetings scheduled via tools like Calendly or x.ai. The entire experience can be automated with just a few clicks.”
The $14 million raised will be disbursed into increasing its operation and workforce in order to meet the growing customer base, as Ramineni said Fireflies plan to democratizing voice-powered AI for meeting notes.
Meanwhile, Legit.ng had previously reported that Godwin Emefiele, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria said cryptocurrency transactions are majorly illegal.
He stated that Nigerians must be careful in dealing with the digital assets which have taken the Nigerian financial market by surprise, after gaining momentum among the young population.
Emefiele said since Elon Musk is sceptical about the cryptos, Nigerians should also be cautious. He said the fall in the cryptocurrency market didn't come as a surprise to him.
Source: Legit.ng
