Startups

Grain lands $16M led by Tiger Global to turn virtual meetings into ‘libraries’

Comment

Image Credits: Grain

Grain, a four-year-old, fully remote startup that’s finding increasingly elaborate ways to capture video snippets of online meetings to make important moments easy to share, search and save, has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global Management.

Other backers in the round include Zoom itself, the Slack Fund, Unusual Ventures and Freestyle VC.

We talked with Grain co-founder and CEO Mike Adams exactly two years ago, during the pandemic’s start, when Grain was earlier on its path to capturing content in video calls that can be shared across platforms, including Twitter, Salesforce, Discord, Notion, Slack and iMessages.

Even then — perhaps especially then — the company’s proposition made sense in a wide number of scenarios. Think of the student wanting to record part of a virtual lecture, or a colleague wanting to flag the most important bits of information conveyed in an online meeting.

At the time, the young company already featured plenty of bells and whistles. Adams told us then that Grain could transcribe content in clips and allow users to turn on closed captions. He said video clips could range from 30 seconds up to 10 minutes and be strung together into reels to create summary highlights. He also told us users could trim or adjust the length of a highlight after it had been recorded, as well as control who else could edit the video afterward to prevent nefarious actors from manipulating the snippets.

Now, Adams says that he and his brother, Jake — a former software engineer at Branch Metrics with whom he co-founded the company — have begun selling many of their customers on Grain’s vision of shared libraries of information, too. “We’re creating a video meeting system of record for content,” says Adams. With Grain, employees can “click and collaborate around insights or topics or relationships or teams.”

Like a true startup founder, he immodestly calls this “an entirely new asset class.”

Grain, a startup built expressly atop of Zoom, has raised $4 million

The pitch is compelling. Human resource departments can save and file away recruitment videos for future reference, for instance. You can similarly imagine sales leads wanting to capture and categorize interviews with customers so it’s easier for a broader group of participants to understand a bug or pain point in a company’s offerings.

“‘Voice of the customer’ used to be synonymous with a customer survey from SurveyMonkey, but surveys are lifeless,” Adams says. “Libraries of insights that can allow a team to have and share a micro moment — even highlight reels of 10 meetings with customers — is a much more compelling way of sharing the reality of an experience.”

Grain is “organizing information so our customers can find signal in the chaos and noise,” says Adams.

Grain is also trying to lock in its customers, of course. “There is a land grab component to this opportunity,” acknowledges Adams, who recently relocated from the Bay Area to Orange County, Ca. “Once people have a place where their content lives and they’ve set up their integrations with Grain and Slack or Grain and Salesforce and they are building this body of knowledge, it isn’t easy to switch providers.”

At the same time, Grain itself is working to become less dependent on Zoom. While Zoom was the only video conferencing company with which Grain worked the last time we talked with Adams, and it remains a “really good user acquisition source,” he says, Grain is “agnostic as to which video platform” a company uses, he stresses.

As for customer adoption, Adams says Grain — which charges $19 per user per month for access to all library video content and the unlimited ability to create new content — now has “thousands of customers,” including the SaaS platform Zapier.

He adds that its tech tends to be embraced by one department within a company, then spread from there. On this front, he points to the Utah-based software company Podium, where he says a product manager was the first to use Grain’s desktop app and where Grain has since sold 100 more “seats” and still sees room to grow. (Podium has roughly 2,000 employees.)

Indeed, Grain, which employs 27 people around the globe and previously raised $4 million from investors, is very much focused on expanding as fast as it can, without getting ahead of itself.

It doesn’t have much choice. While Adams doesn’t see Grain operating in a winner-take-all-market, there are a lot of rivals with which it is competing, including Debrief, Descript and Perfect Recall, to name just a few.

The new funding should help on that front. Grain also recently acquired PingPong, a video messaging platform backed by YC, Techstars and MatchStick Ventures, and brought aboard PingPong’s founder, Jeff Whitlock, as its head of operations. It isn’t disclosing terms of the deal.

More TechCrunch

Hydrow, the at-home rowing machine, announced Thursday that it has acquired a majority stake in Speede Fitness, the company behind the AI-enabled strength training machine. The rowing startup also announced…

Rowing startup Hydrow acquires a majority stake in Speede Fitness as their CEO steps down

Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global…

Retell AI lets companies build ‘voice agents’ to answer phone calls

TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that…

TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3

India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI payments rail by one to two years, sources familiar with the…

India weighs delaying caps on UPI market share in win for PhonePe, Google Pay

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.

Thai food delivery app Line Man Wongnai weighs IPO in Thailand, US in 2025

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?

Google has found a way to bring a variation of its clever “Circle to Search” gesture to iPhone users. The new interaction, launched in January, allows Android users to search…

Google brings a variation on ‘Circle to Search’ to iPhone users

A new sculpture going live on Wednesday in the Flatiron South Public Plaza in New York is not your typical artwork. It combines technology, sociology, anthropology and art to let…

Always-on video portal lets people in NYC and Dublin interact in real time

Apple’s iPad event had a lot to like. New iPads with new chips and new sizes, a new Apple Pencil, and even some software updates. If you are a big…

TechCrunch Minute: When did iPads get as expensive as MacBooks?

Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents. The company announced…

Bye-bye bots: Altera’s game-playing AI agents get backing from Eric Schmidt

Google DeepMind has taken the wraps off a new version of AlphaFold, their transformative machine learning model that predicts the shape and behavior of proteins. AlphaFold 3 is not only…

Google DeepMind debuts huge AlphaFold update and free proteomics-as-a-service web app

Uber plans to deliver more perks to Uber One members, like member-exclusive events, in a bid to gain more revenue through subscriptions.  “You will see more member-exclusives coming up where…

Uber promises member exclusives as Uber One passes $1B run-rate

We’ve all seen them. The inspector with a clipboard, walking around a building, ticking off the last time the fire extinguishers were checked, or if all the lights are working.…

Checkfirst raises $1.5M pre-seed to apply AI to remote inspections and audits

Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become…

Controversial drone company Xtend leans into defense with new $40 million round

Usually, when something starts to rot, it gets pitched in the trash. But Joanne Rodriguez wants to turn the concept of rot on its head by growing fungus on trash…

Mycocycle uses mushrooms to upcycle old tires and construction waste

Monzo has raised another £150 million ($190 million), as the challenger bank looks to expand its presence internationally — particularly in the U.S. The new round comes just two months…

UK challenger bank Monzo nabs another $190M as US expansion beckons

iRobot has announced the successor to longtime CEO, Colin Angle. Gary Cohen, who previous held chief executive role at Timex and Qualitor Automotive, will be heading up the company, marking a major…

iRobot names former Timex head Gary Cohen as CEO

Reddit — now a publicly-traded company with more scrutiny on revenue growth — is putting a big focus on boosting its international audience, starting with francophones. In their first-ever earnings…

Reddit tests automatic, whole-site translation into French using LLM-based AI

Mushrooms continue to be a big area for alternative proteins. Canada-based Maia Farms recently raised $1.7 million to develop a blend of mushroom and plant-based protein using biomass fermentation. There’s…

Meati Foods bites into another $100M amid growth to 7,000 retail locations

Cleaning the outside of buildings is a dirty job, and it’s also dangerous. Lucid Bots came on the scene in 2018 with its Sherpa line of drones to clean windows…

Lucid Bots secures $9M for drones to clean more than your windows

High interest rates and financial pressures make it more important than ever for finance teams to have a better handle on their cash flow, and several startups are hoping to…

Israeli startup Panax raises a $10M Series A for its AI-driven cash flow management platform

The European Union has deepened the investigation of Elon Musk-owned social network, X, that it opened back in December under the bloc’s online governance and content moderation rulebook, the Digital Services Act…

EU grills Elon Musk’s X about content moderation and deepfake risks

For the founders of Atlan, a data governance startup, data has always been at the heart of what they do, even before they launched the company. In fact, co-founders Prukalpa…

Atlan scores $105M for its data control plane, as LLMs boost importance of data

It is estimated that about 2 billion people, especially those in lower and middle-income countries, lack access to quality and affordable essential medicines. The situation is exacerbated by low-quality or even killer…

Axmed raises $2M from Founderful to streamline drug supply chains in underserved markets