Atlassian on Thursday introduced that it has acquired Rewatch, an AI-powered assembly notetaker, display recording device and video hub. The firm plans to combine Rewatch into Loom, the asynchronous video messaging platform it acquired for $975 million final October. But perhaps 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 shortly turn out to be Jira points, for instance, and the transcripts turn out to be searchable inside the general enterprise context.
The two corporations didn’t disclose the worth of the acquisition. Back within the heady days of early 2021, when all people was seemingly on the lookout for construct higher video-centric options, Rewatch raised a $20 million Series A spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz. The firm 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 provided an integration with Zoom to file conferences and create transcripts. But 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 motive 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. This is as a result of 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 and enterprise and it’s additionally constructing on high 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. But it was Atlassian’s company improvement workforce 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 truly be fairly simple, particularly now that Loom has moved its stack over to the Atlassian platform itself.
The actual problem now could be to supply the perfect person expertise, he mentioned. Once an agent joins a gathering, it has to know a number of context; despite the fact that this will likely be a human-in-the-loop system, it nonetheless has to get it proper more often than not. If it always suggests the fallacious motion gadgets after a gathering, for instance, customers will shortly quit on it.
“Rovo and brokers is, I believe, comparatively technically complicated but in addition end-user complicated when it comes to, OK, if we’re speaking a couple of Confluence Doc, what elements of that am I updating? What is definitely useful for an end-user or assembly attendees to do on their behalf, from an AI agent perspective? That is one thing that’s comparatively new for lots of us at Atlassian. […] I believe that that’ll most likely take six to 12 months to actually lock in on that entrance, with a number of experiments between from time to time,” Thomas mentioned.
One different Rewatch characteristic that Atlassian was particularly concerned with is its calendar integration. The Rewatch workforce made {that a} very simple expertise, the place customers can merely toggle the assembly bot on and off for every assembly. Rewatch additionally options various automation options that, for instance, ship out the assembly notes to each attendee. Indeed, Thomas famous that whereas the Rewatch workforce confronted a number of challenges in constructing the product, constructing the calendar integration meant coping with extra edge instances and extra friction than constructing most different elements of the Rewatch stack.
Once the mixing is full, the Loom AI agent will be capable of be a part of Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams conferences. It’ll create a full transcript, assembly notes and motion gadgets that it may well then robotically 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. Together, they’ve seen over a billion views. Clearly, that’s one thing Atlassian is attempting to lean into, however the firm can also be neatly increasing past this core characteristic of asynchronous messaging by among the different ways in which movies — and their transcripts — are generated inside a enterprise context.
