Otter.ai announced on 20 October 2026 that it has raised $320 million, all from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund. It is financing rather than equity: General Catalyst takes no stake and receives a share of the revenue the marketing spend generates, and Otter repays it with interest.
“We do need to pay them back.”
Sam Liang, Otter.ai CEO, to Reuters, to Reuters · thetechportal.com ↗
The meeting-notes company says it has more than 40 million users, up from 25 million a year earlier, and counts 86% of the Fortune 500 as customers. It passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year and gave no newer figure. Its earlier funding was about $50 million per TechCrunch and PitchBook, though The Tech Portal puts it between $50 million and $73 million. The money is meant for enterprise growth, sales hiring, international offices and product work, and Reuters reports Otter aims to at least double enterprise business next year by tripling sales and marketing spend.
SiliconANGLE's lead image for the Otter.ai funding story
Image: SiliconANGLE
On the product side, Otter is testing a pre-meeting brief and Live Assist, which lets users question the assistant during a call. It also named Alex Gay, formerly of Superhuman, as chief marketing officer. The service offers transcripts with speaker labels, summaries, search, integrations with HubSpot, Snowflake and Jira, and an MCP server.
About Otter.ai
Otter.ai is an American transcription software company based in Mountain View, California. Its Otter software uses speech recognition and machine learning to caption live speakers and write up meetings, and Sam Liang is its CEO.
It began in 2016 as AISense, founded by Sam Liang and Yun Fu, and in January 2020 announced a $10 million round led by Docomo Ventures, the investment arm of NTT Docomo. Privacy questions have followed the service for years: in 2018 ZDNet raised concerns over its access to uploaded recordings, the University of Massachusetts has banned it citing the state's all-party consent rule, and users have complained that it joined meetings they had not asked it to join.
TechCrunch notes the field is crowded, with Fireflies.ai, Granola, Read AI, Fathom and Circleback competing and Zoom, Teams and Meet shipping their own notetakers, and that Otter gave no active-user or churn figures. The Tech Portal recalls a proposed class action filed in California in August 2025 alleging Otter records non-users and trains on recordings.
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