Krish Ramineni, Co-Founder and CEO of Fireflies.ai

Even as the debate continues about whether IT employees should come to offices, stay home and work remotely, or choose the hybrid model, this AI-based startup, which is ‘office-less’, is becoming a unicorn. (A unicorn is an entity with a valuation of $1 billion.)

The startup has 120 employees working remotely from over 40 cities globally. The note-taking solutions provider for virtual meetings serves users across 500,000 companies, including three out of five unicorn companies in India.

The co-founder, Krish Ramineni, told businessline that the $1 billion valuation was achieved through a tender offer, a secondary sale, which provided liquidity to early employees. Ramineni stated that this was a “conservative market valuation” and that it “would be much higher” if they had sought a traditional fundraising round.

He said Fireflies has been profitable for the last two years. Their total funding to date stands at $19-20 million, raised across a $4 million seed round in 2019 and a $14 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from its seed investor, Canaan Partners.

Fireflies is building a ‘real-time assistant’ that can function as a ‘sales coach’ during conversations, whispering in your ear with suggested answers or actions.

“We are working on a feature that allows users to make Fireflies to attend meetings on their behalf. This feature is expected to be released by the end of this year. In the long term,” he said.

Fireflies, which started as a silent notetaker, has evolved into a comprehensive AI teammate. It now offers real-time meeting notes and transcripts,” he said in a virtual call.

He said the company shifted from being a general notetaker to solving for various industry verticals, including sales, recruiting, finance, and healthcare, by generating different types of notes tailored to specific professions like doctors or recruiters.

“The core idea is to transform Fireflies into a proactive teammate that can talk in real time like a human would during meetings.

“The idea is to make it like a teammate that I would have on a call rather than just a silent notetaker. It should be a proactive teammate that I can talk to almost like an intern or an analyst,” he said.

The company has recently tied up with GenAI company Perplexity to allow the meeting participants to seek answers on market dynamics or any other related topic that suits the agenda of the conference.

“You can even get updated about a meeting by asking – Hey, Fireflies, catch me up on the call because I just joined late, or inquire about information directly during the meeting. 

“The platform is designed to bring context to meetings, remembering past discussions and informing participants about previous interactions,” he said.

App store

The startup launched over 200 AI applications and an AI app store, allowing Fireflies to perform skills beyond just note-taking to meet the varied requirements of its users.

“These applications can convert conversations into blog drafts, write thank-you emails, extract information for CRM software, score calls, and detect sentiment,” he said.

While Fireflies built many of these apps internally, they have also opened up the platform for third-party developers to create their own workflows and AI apps, which are hosted on the Fireflies app store.

Published on June 23, 2025