Superhuman Acquires YC-Backed Fathom to Power Proactive AI Workflows
Superhuman is joining the growing ranks of productivity platforms launching meeting notetakers — but rather than building one in-house, it is acquiring Y Combinator-backed Fathom.
AI-powered productivity platforms aim to automate work. Typically, that automation is triggered when a user types prompts and creates workflows. But it would be even better if AI could proactively initiate work — and for that, the topics and action items discussed in meetings are key. Hence the push by Superhuman and similar platforms into notetaking.
Fathom's Traction and Backing
Founded in 2020, Fathom has raised over $30 million in funding and was valued at $94 million in 2024, according to PitchBook data. Its investors include Zoom Apps Fund, Telescope Partners, BoxOne Ventures, and Maven Ventures. Its cap table also includes individuals such as Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt.
The notetaker offers a generous free plan, which has helped it accumulate over 400,000 monthly active users. The company says more than 1 million people have recorded meetings on its platform to date.
Superhuman Tested a Notetaker Internally Before Choosing to Buy
TechCrunch learned that earlier this year, Superhuman tested a notetaker internally with select users, but ultimately chose to acquire a finished product to integrate with its AI-centered productivity suite. Shishir Mehrotra, Superhuman's CEO, acknowledged this, saying the testing process made the company realize how hard it is to build a notetaker.
"We've been working internally on this area for a while as well. I think it greatly increased our confidence in the demand in this category. It also became very clear how deep the products in this category are and how much you need to build. A lot of these products make the job feel really easy, but it's actually quite tricky to do a great job in all parts [of meeting recording]," Mehrotra told TechCrunch over a call.
Mehrotra said he was impressed with some of the technical intricacies built by the Fathom team but didn't elaborate on which ones. He did tease that with a notetaker, Superhuman can work on surfacing meeting context in real time.
Intense Competition in the Meeting Notetaker Space
Competition in the meeting notetaker space is intense. Startups like Granola, Read AI, and new entrant Wispr have raised millions of dollars to fuel growth. Despite having healthy customer bases or revenue run rates, venture-backed notetakers are feeling market pressure to do more than just notetaking. Some of these factors played a role in Superhuman's decision to acquire Fathom, while Fathom CEO Richard White said Superhuman's 40 million user base was a good opportunity to reach users at scale.
"The reach of Superhuman is massive. I have always thought about M&A in terms of speed of building a product that everyone uses, and a part of that comes down to distribution. If we were to operate Fathom as a standalone company, we would have to build a lot of things that are already in the Superhuman platform," he said.
Superhuman's Expanding Platform Play
On the platform front, Superhuman already offers an email client, a docs app, a calendar, a database solution, and a newly launched AI agent builder platform. With a meeting notetaker at the center, Superhuman can draft emails, update data entries, schedule follow-up meetings, and have AI agents start work and extract insights — moving closer to a truly agentic productivity suite.