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 possibly much more importantly, it additionally plans to combine it into its lately launched Rovo AI platform in order that assembly notes can shortly turn into Jira points, for instance, and the transcripts turn into searchable inside the total enterprise context.
The 2 corporations 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 instructed me in an unique interview forward of Thursday’s announcement, Loom already supplied an integration with Zoom to document conferences and create transcripts. However that solely felt tangential to what the corporate was attempting to do with Loom, he stated.
“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 consider Atlassian is disproportionately positioned to take assembly recordings and maximize the worth of them. It is 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 just a few years in the past. But it surely was Atlassian’s company growth group 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 truly be fairly easy, particularly now that Loom has moved its stack over to the Atlassian platform.
The true problem now’s to offer the perfect person expertise, he stated. As soon as an agent joins a gathering, it has to know quite a lot of context; regardless that this shall be a human-in-the-loop system, it nonetheless has to get it proper more often than not. If it continuously suggests the flawed motion gadgets after a gathering, for instance, customers will shortly quit 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 components of that am I updating? What is definitely priceless 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 most likely take an excellent six to 12 months to actually lock in on that entrance, with quite a lot of experiments between every now and then,” Thomas stated.
One different Rewatch function that Atlassian was particularly enthusiastic 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 few automation options that, for instance, ship out the assembly notes to each attendee. Certainly, Thomas famous that whereas the Rewatch group 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 mixing is full, the Loom AI agent will be capable of be 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 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 dwell 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 be well increasing past this core function of asynchronous messaging by taking a look at a few of the different ways in which movies — and their transcripts — are generated inside a enterprise context.
