Atlassian on Thursday introduced that it has acquired Rewatch, an AI-powered assembly notetaker, display recording software and video hub. The corporate plans to combine Rewatch into Loom, the asynchronous video messaging platform it acquired for $975 million final October. However perhaps much more importantly, it additionally plans to combine it into its lately launched Rovo AI platform in order that assembly notes can rapidly change into Jira points, for instance, and the transcripts change into searchable throughout the total enterprise context.
The 2 firms didn’t disclose the value of the acquisition. Again within the heady days of early 2021, when everyone was seemingly on the lookout for higher video-centric options, Rewatch raised a $20 million Sequence A spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz. The corporate didn’t increase any extra funding since, in response to Crunchbase.
As Loom co-founder Joe Thomas informed me in an unique interview forward of Thursday’s announcement, Loom already supplied an integration with Zoom to file conferences and create transcripts. However that solely felt tangential to what the corporate was making an attempt to do with Loom, he mentioned.
“It was price evolving our platform and bringing in nice IP from Rewatch to speed up our efforts there,” Thomas unhappy. “The rationale why we obtained so enthusiastic about Rewatch is the truth that we consider Atlassian is disproportionately positioned to take assembly recordings and maximize the worth of them. It’s because Loom already generates transcripts for each single video that’s created after which we layer all of the AI prompts round it — a part of Rovo is that it’s a unified search [platform] throughout an enterprise and it’s additionally constructing on prime of it.”
Loom and Rewatch share a typical investor in Andreessen Horowitz; Thomas and Rewatch founder Connor Sears often discovered themselves in the identical conferences a number of years in the past. But it surely was Atlassian’s company growth staff that first met with Rewatch after which requested Thomas to satisfy up with the corporate, too.
Thomas believes that integrating Rewatch’s tech stack will really be fairly simple, particularly now that Loom has moved its stack over to the Atlassian platform.
The true problem now’s to supply the very best person expertise, he mentioned. As soon as an agent joins a gathering, it has to know plenty of context; although this might be a human-in-the-loop system, it nonetheless has to get it proper more often than not. If it continuously suggests the fallacious motion gadgets after a gathering, for instance, customers will rapidly surrender on it.
“Rovo and brokers is, I feel, comparatively technically complicated but in addition end-user complicated when it comes to, OK, if we’re speaking a few Confluence Doc, what elements of that am I updating? What is definitely worthwhile for an finish person or assembly attendees to do on their behalf, from an AI agent perspective? That’s one thing that’s comparatively new for lots of us at Atlassian. … I feel that that’ll in all probability take an excellent six to 12 months to essentially lock in on that entrance, with plenty of experiments between every now and then,” Thomas mentioned.
One different Rewatch function that Atlassian was particularly concerned with is its calendar integration. The Rewatch staff made {that a} very simple expertise, the place customers can merely toggle the assembly bot on and off for every assembly. Rewatch additionally options plenty of automation options that, for instance, ship out the assembly notes to each attendee. Certainly, Thomas famous that whereas the Rewatch staff confronted plenty of challenges in constructing the product, constructing the calendar integration meant coping with extra edge circumstances and extra friction than constructing most different elements of the Rewatch stack.
As soon as the combination is full, the Loom AI agent will have the ability to be a part of Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Groups conferences. It’ll create a full transcript, assembly notes and motion gadgets that it could then routinely correlate to Confluence pages, Jira points and repair tickets.
He famous that Loom’s mission stays to empower efficient communication through video messages at work. Loom has over 31 million registered customers and 360 million movies stay on the platform. Collectively, they’ve seen over a billion views. Clearly, that’s one thing Atlassian is making an attempt to lean into, however the firm can also be well increasing past this core function of asynchronous messaging by taking a look at among the different ways in which movies — and their transcripts — are generated inside a enterprise context.