Atlassian Expands into AI Meeting Bots with Rewatch Acquisition

On Thursday, Atlassian revealed its acquisition of Rewatch, a platform that leverages AI for taking meeting notes and recording screens, and operates as a video repository. The integration of Rewatch is planned for Loom, the video messaging service Atlassian purchased for $975 million the previous October, as well as into its newly deployed Rovo AI platform. This integration aims to transform meeting notes into Jira tasks swiftly and make transcript content easily searchable within an enterprise setting.

The financial details of this acquisition were not disclosed by either party. During the bustling early months of 2021, amidst a surge in demand for video-focused solutions, Rewatch secured a $20 million Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, as per Crunchbase, and has not sought further funding since then.

In an exclusive discussion before the announcement, Joe Thomas, co-founder of Loom, mentioned that while Loom previously facilitated Zoom meeting recordings and transcription, this functionality was somewhat peripheral to Loom’s core ambitions. “Integrating Rewatch’s strong intellectual property was a strategic move to enhance our platform’s capabilities,” remarked Thomas. He underscored that Atlassian, with its comprehensive access to meeting content and AI-enhanced search functionalities within its Rovo platform, is in a unique position to enrich the value derived from meeting recordings.

Shared investment by Andreessen Horowitz links Loom and Rewatch; Thomas and Rewatch’s founder, Connor Sears, had previously crossed paths in meetings. An initial dialogue with Rewatch was initiated by Atlassian’s corporate development squad, which subsequentially invited Thomas to engage with Rewatch likewise.

Thomas is optimistic about the ease of assimilating Rewatch’s technology, especially since Loom has already transitioned its software stack to Atlassian’s platform.

He emphasizes the chief objective now is refining the user experience. A significant aspect involves the system’s context-awareness during meetings, which, despite being a human-augmented system, demands high accuracy in suggesting correct follow-up actions to avoid user disengagement.

“Navigating the complexities of Rovo and its agents—technically and from an end-user standpoint—is challenging, especially in contextualizing tasks like updates to a Confluence document. Determining what actions the AI agents should autonomously perform to add tangible value for meeting participants is a novel pursuit for us at Atlassian. This endeavor is likely to span six to 12 months of experimentation,” Thomas articulated.

Furthermore, Atlassian was particularly drawn to Rewatch’s calendar integration capability, which simplifies activating or deactivating the meeting bot for various sessions. The Rewatch platform encompasses several automation features. For instance, it automatically distributes meeting notes to all participants. Tackling the calendar integration posed significant challenges for Rewatch, dealing with numerous edge cases and user friction in contrast to other aspects of the Rewatch framework.

Upon integration’s culmination, the Loom AI agent will seamlessly participate in Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams sessions, documenting comprehensive transcripts, meeting summaries, and actionable items. These outputs will be directly linked to pertinent Confluence pages, Jira tasks, and service tickets.

Loom’s purpose is to facilitate effective video message communication within the workspace, boasting over 31 million users and hosting 360 million videos, which collectively have surpassed a billion views. By concentrating on enhancing these core functionalities alongside exploring additional applications for video content and transcripts within the workplace, Atlassian continues to extend its impact.