Spot wants to free you from your never-ending Zoom meetings, and it just landed funding from high-profile Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins.
Spot, led by Chicago entrepreneur Greg Caplan, raised a $5 million seed round Thursday from Kleiner, a Valley firm known for its investments in tech giants like Amazon, Google and Twitter. The new cash comes on the heels of a $1.9 million round Spot raised in March from Chapter One, Starting Line and other firms.
Spot, founded earlier this year, wants to keep you untethered from your computer during work calls and allows you to take walking meetings with its audio-only app.
Users send a Spot Link via calendar invite just as you would with Zoom or Microsoft Teams, but instead of sitting down for a video call, users are able to put on their headphones and put their phone in their pocket. Spot records the call, and uses a virtual assistant to take notes. Users can say "Spot, fetch" (or press a button on the screen) and Spot will automatically transcribe the last 40 seconds of the call. Attendees can share meeting highlights and follow up notes with others after the call.
Spot also has a collaborative notes section where attendees can write out the meeting's agenda and jot down other notes in real time.
The app, currently in Beta, plans to monetize by offering premium features down the line, Caplan told me.
Caplan previously founded Remote Year, a Chicago travel startup that helps people work remotely while traveling the world. That company, hit hard by the pandemic, was acquired last year by hospitality brand Selina, which plans to launch new Remote Year programs this year.
