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 shortly turn into Jira points, for instance, and the transcripts turn into searchable inside the general enterprise context.
The 2 corporations didn’t disclose the value of the acquisition. Again within the heady days of early 2021, when everyone was seemingly searching for higher video-centric options, Rewatch raised a $20 million Sequence A spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz. The corporate didn’t elevate any further 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 document conferences and create transcripts. However that solely felt tangential to what the corporate was attempting 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 an 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 just a few years in the past. Nevertheless it was Atlassian’s company improvement 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 supply the most effective person expertise, he mentioned. As soon as an agent joins a gathering, it has to grasp a number of context; regardless that this will likely be a human-in-the-loop system, it nonetheless has to get it proper more often than not. If it continuously suggests the incorrect motion gadgets after a gathering, for instance, customers will shortly surrender 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 characteristic that Atlassian was particularly interested by 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 a variety of automation options that, for instance, ship out the assembly notes to each attendee. Certainly, Thomas famous that whereas the Rewatch group 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.
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 may well then robotically correlate to Confluence pages, Jira points and repair tickets.
He famous that Loom’s mission stays to empower efficient communication by way of 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 neatly increasing past this core characteristic of asynchronous messaging by a few of the different ways in which movies — and their transcripts — are generated inside a enterprise context.
