Atlassian on Thursday introduced that it has acquired Rewatch, an AI-powered assembly notetaker, display screen recording device and video hub. The corporate plans to combine Rewatch into Loom, the asynchronous video messaging platform it acquired for $975 million final October. However possibly much more importantly, it additionally plans to combine it into its not too long ago launched Rovo AI platform in order that assembly notes can rapidly grow to be Jira points, for instance, and the transcripts grow to be 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 in search of construct higher video-centric options, Rewatch raised a $20 million Collection A spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz. The corporate didn’t elevate any extra funding since, based on 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 worth evolving our platform and bringing in great IP from Rewatch to accelerate our efforts there,” Thomas unhappy. “The reason why we got so excited about Rewatch is the fact that we believe Atlassian is disproportionately positioned to take meeting recordings and maximize the value of them. This is because Loom already generates transcripts for every single video that’s created and then we layer all the AI prompts around it — part of Rovo is that it is a unified search [platform] across and enterprise and it’s also building on top of it.”
Loom and Rewatch share a standard investor in Andreessen Horowitz; Thomas and Rewatch founder Connor Sears sometimes discovered themselves in the identical conferences a couple of years in the past. Nevertheless it was Atlassian’s company growth crew that first met with Rewatch after which requested Thomas to fulfill up with the corporate, too.
Thomas believes that integrating Rewatch’s tech stack will really be fairly easy, particularly now that Loom has moved its stack over to the Atlassian platform itself.
The actual problem now could be to offer the very best consumer expertise, he mentioned. As soon as an agent joins a gathering, it has to grasp quite a lot of context; regardless that this can be a human-in-the-loop system, it nonetheless has to get it proper more often than not. If it consistently suggests the mistaken motion gadgets after a gathering, for instance, customers will rapidly quit on it.
“Rovo and agents is, I think, relatively technically complex but also end-user complex in terms of, OK, if we are talking about a Confluence Doc, what parts of that am I updating? What is actually valuable for an end-user or meeting attendees to do on their behalf, from an AI agent perspective? That is something that is relatively new for a lot of us at Atlassian. […] I think that that’ll probably take a good six to 12 months to really lock in on that front, with a lot of experiments between now and then,” Thomas mentioned.
One different Rewatch function that Atlassian was particularly desirous about is its calendar integration. The Rewatch crew made {that a} very easy expertise, the place customers can merely toggle the assembly bot on and off for every assembly. Rewatch additionally options a variety of automation options that, for instance, ship out the assembly notes to each attendee. Certainly, Thomas famous that whereas the Rewatch crew confronted quite a lot of challenges in constructing the product, constructing the calendar integration meant coping with extra edge circumstances and extra friction than constructing most different components of the Rewatch stack.
As soon as the combination is full, the Loom AI agent will be capable 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 actually 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 dwell 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 be neatly increasing past this core function of asynchronous messaging by among the different ways in which movies — and their transcripts — are generated inside a enterprise context.
