Atlassian on Thursday introduced that it has acquired Rewatch, an AI-powered assembly notetaker, display recording instrument 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 lately launched Rovo AI platform in order that assembly notes can rapidly change into Jira points, for instance, and the transcripts change into searchable inside the general enterprise context.
The 2 firms didn’t disclose the worth 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 Collection A spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz. The corporate didn’t elevate any further funding since, in keeping with Crunchbase.
As Loom co-founder Joe Thomas advised me in an unique interview forward of Thursday’s announcement, Loom already provided an integration with Zoom to report conferences and create transcripts. However that solely felt tangential to what the corporate was attempting to do with Loom, he mentioned.
“It was value evolving our platform and bringing in nice IP from Rewatch to speed up our efforts there,” Thomas unhappy. “The explanation why we received so enthusiastic about Rewatch is the truth that we imagine 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 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. However it was Atlassian’s company improvement group 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 easy, particularly now that Loom has moved its stack over to the Atlassian platform.
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 know plenty of context; although this shall be a human-in-the-loop system, it nonetheless has to get it proper more often than not. If it continually suggests the incorrect motion objects after a gathering, for instance, customers will rapidly quit on it.
“Rovo and brokers is, I feel, comparatively technically advanced but additionally end-user advanced by way of, OK, if we’re speaking a couple of Confluence Doc, what components of that am I updating? What is definitely priceless for an finish consumer 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 six to 12 months to actually lock in on that entrance, with plenty of experiments between at times,” Thomas mentioned.
One different Rewatch function that Atlassian was particularly curious about is its calendar integration. The Rewatch group made {that a} very easy expertise, the place customers can merely toggle the assembly bot on and off for every assembly. Rewatch additionally options quite a lot of automation options that, for instance, ship out the assembly notes to each attendee. Certainly, Thomas famous that whereas the Rewatch group 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 components of the Rewatch stack.
As soon as the mixing 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 objects that it may well then mechanically 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 attempting 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.
