Otter.ai, originally incorporated as AISense, is a US-based AI meeting assistant founded in 2016 by Sam Liang and Yun Fu. Liang previously led the location services team at Google Maps — building the blue-dot location indicator — and later founded mobile analytics startup Alohar Mobile, which Alibaba acquired in 2013. Yun Fu came from a background in speech recognition research at Yahoo and IBM.
The product launched publicly in 2018 with live meeting transcription and has since evolved into OtterPilot, an AI assistant that can automatically join calls on Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, transcribe them in real time, generate concise summaries, and extract action items. Newer releases add Otter AI Chat for asking questions about past meetings, automated follow-up emails, and CRM-aware sales agents that log call details to Salesforce and HubSpot.
Otter has raised around $63M in total venture funding, headlined by a $50M Series B in February 2021 led by Spectrum Equity with participation from Horizons Ventures, Draper Associates, GGV Capital, and the Draper Dragon Fund. The company is profitable on certain product lines and reports tens of millions of registered users across enterprise, education, and individual plans.
Pricing starts with a free Basic plan offering 300 monthly transcription minutes and 30-minute meeting limits, scaling through Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers with longer recordings, OtterPilot autopilot mode, advanced admin controls, SSO, and HIPAA-compliant options for healthcare customers.
Otter differentiates itself by being one of the earliest and most widely-deployed meeting AIs, with deep integrations into the major video-conferencing platforms and a brand strong enough that 'Otter' is often used as a generic verb for AI transcription. Its main competition now comes from Fireflies.ai, Read.ai, Microsoft Copilot for Teams, Zoom AI Companion, and Google Gemini in Meet — many of which ship for free with the underlying meeting platform.