Fathom is an AI meeting intelligence platform that captures, transcribes, and summarizes conversations, helping teams turn meetings into actionable insights. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Fathom founder and CEO Richard White to learn more.
Richard White’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? White said:
“I would describe my background as engineer-turned-designer-turned-hybrid of those two things. I started my career at Kiko, a company in the first batch of Y Combinator that was kind of a Google Calendar before Google Calendar existed. That experience really shaped how I think about building products.”
“I went on to found UserVoice, which became notable for inventing the feedback tabs you see on millions of websites today. I raised about $10 million for that company and ran it from 2008 to 2020. The thread through my career is taking concepts that already exist in the world and making them much more user-friendly and accessible to a larger audience. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? White shared:
“The idea for Fathom came from a pain point I experienced firsthand. In early 2020, pre-pandemic, I was running UserVoice and doing a ton of product research that suddenly required 15 to 20 Zoom calls a day, back-to-back, 20 minutes each. As a CEO, you’re not always on that many meetings, so it hit me very quickly how awful it was.”
“I don’t think anyone enjoys trying to talk and be a stenographer at the same time. I’m really not good at doing both at the same time. I’d get off one call, barely have time to clean up my notes, and jump into the next one. Then two weeks later, I’d look at my notes and couldn’t even remember which conversation was which. The biggest problem was that after doing two weeks of research with 15 calls a day, I’d share a few bullet points with my team and it just wouldn’t land. Everything got lost in translation.”
“We had two key hypotheses when starting this company. First, that transcription was going to become free — or at least very cheap. We believed that while many people don’t really want a transcript, the transcript is the key ingredient for all the fun things you can do with AI. Second, we believed AI was going to get really good over the next couple years. That seems obvious now, but I remember in 2020 when we put “AI” in our product name, all my early investors freaked out and said, “Don’t do that. People don’t like AI!” So we were definitely early on that bet, but it paid off.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? White reflected:
“The Series A announcement was a really proud moment for me, but not for the typical reasons. What made it special was that our users invested over $2 million at the same terms as the VCs in just a few weeks through Wefunder. That was amazing.”
“The story I’m most proud of is how we got here and why Fathom became the top-rated meeting intelligence platform. Seeing us achieve that #1 Highest Satisfaction Product rating on G2 with a perfect 5.0 from over 3,000 reviews, becoming the most-installed AI meeting assistant on both Zoom and HubSpot, and watching our revenue grow 90x in two years — those milestones represent so much hard work from the team and trust from our users. We owe much of our growth to these users, who recommend Fathom to everyone they meet. The impact of their advocacy cannot be understated. That’s what makes this journey so rewarding.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? White explained:
“Fathom is an AI-powered meeting intelligence platform that enables teams to have more productive conversations. We record, transcribe, summarize and analyze meetings to surface key moments, decisions and action items. Our core differentiator is our proprietary transcription technology. We built it in-house rather than relying on third-party services. This gives us what we believe is the most accurate transcript in the industry, which is critical because everything else — summaries, action items, insights — builds on that transcript.”
“One of our most powerful features is Ask Fathom, which has evolved significantly. Ask Fathom has evolved from answering questions about individual meetings to becoming an account-wide meeting intelligence layer. Teams can now query insights across their organization’s meeting history, identify trends, surface customer feedback patterns, analyze competitors, and instantly retrieve supporting clips and citations from conversations. Every answer links directly back to the exact transcript moment for verification and context. Sales leaders can ask, “What competitors are trending up most recently? Show me some clips,” and engineering teams can query our four years of engineering meetings and get a six-page synthesized document.”
“We integrate deeply with CRMs (over 8,500 companies use our HubSpot integration), automatically pushing structured fields like pain points, timing and decision-makers into Salesforce and HubSpot. We recently launched direct Asana integration for action items, AI Scorecards for coaching and a public API with webhooks for custom workflows. Our public API and MCP integrations bring Fathom’s meeting intelligence directly into the tools teams already use, from CRMs to LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT. The platform works across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams and now gives users flexible recording options including traditional bots, bot-free capture, or full video recording. We also offer a very robust free plan with unlimited meetings and five AI summaries per month.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? White acknowledged:
“The biggest challenge we’re facing now is operating in an extremely crowded market. There’s a lot of competition in this space, and we’re constantly seeing new entrants — including Y Combinator batch companies that position themselves as ‘like Fathom, but [blank].’”
“We see this less as a challenge than an affirmation that what we’re doing has worked. We invested heavily from day one in things that are hard but foundational — including distribution, reliability and user experience — while making a strategic bet that AI would get really good. While competitors hired linguistics experts and ML specialists to build their own models, we stuck to our conviction that the real winners in the space would be those who could apply AI effectively to solve real problems, not those who built the models themselves. This allowed us to be nimble with a smaller team and give away a robust free product, which drove viral growth. When GPT-4 and Claude came along in 2022-2023, we were ready with the infrastructure to immediately deploy them, while others were still catching up with their in-house solutions.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? White noted:
“The evolution has been dramatic, and that’s largely a reflection of the expansion of capabilities in generative AI. A few years ago, the technology meant that we could write really good notes for a meeting. Now we can do so much more. We’ve moved well beyond just transcription. We realized early on that while transcripts are valuable for the person who was on the call — helping them to find specific moments — they’re not that helpful for people who weren’t there. So we built our intelligence layer to focus on structured insights.”
“We offer customizable AI summaries with templates for different sales methodologies like SPICED, MEDDPICC, BANT and Sandler. The AI adapts to your business, not the other way around. One of our key innovations is what I call ‘context bridges’ — when you get a Fathom summary, almost every point links directly back to that moment in the recording. We believe notes should serve as a map of the conversation, not a substitute for it. This seemingly small feature completely transforms how people use meeting intelligence.”
“We’ve also evolved from a note-taking tool to a broader meeting intelligence platform with AI Scorecards, competitive intelligence dashboards and automated CRM updates. We’re moving toward a world where Fathom does more and more of the work for you automatically.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? White cited:
“Growth Metrics:
- 90x revenue growth over the last two years
- 20x increase in usage since 2022
- Perfect 5.0 rating on G2 with more than 6,500 reviews—making us the #1 Highest Satisfaction product of 2024 out of more than 100,000 products
- Most-installed AI meeting assistant on both Zoom and HubSpot marketplaces
- Fastest Growing App of 2023 on HubSpot Marketplace
- Over 8,500 companies using our HubSpot integration
- Fathom named HubSpot’s Most Used App of the Year for 2025
- Named to G2’s 2026 Best Global Software Companies list
Funding Milestones:
- Going through Y Combinator Winter 2021 batch—actually my first formal time going through YC, though I’d been YC-adjacent for 14 years
- $4.7 million seed round in early 2022
- $17 million Series A in September 2024, led by Telescope Partners
- The Series A was particularly special because we reserved 10% for our users, who invested over $2 million via Wefunder in just two to three weeks
- Total of $27 million raised with over 1,300 individual investors
Product Milestones:
- Being one of 50 launch partners for the Zoom App Store, which helped us get our first 100,000 users and kickstart our viral flywheel
- Launch of our public API
- AI Scorecards for coaching
- Direct Asana integration
- Expanded Ask Fathom feature that understands entire company meeting histories
- Launch of bot-free capture, giving users per-meeting choice between bot, botless audio, or full video
- iOS mobile app enabling in-person meeting capture and on-the-go review
Each of these milestones represents not just a number, but genuine impact on how teams work and communicate.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? White highlighted:
“Netgain Solutions, a B2B accounting software company, had a visibility problem. They had hardly any insights into where calls were in the sales journey. Their Revenue Operations Manager, James Hinkson, was constantly being asked about deal status. When anyone wanted to know where a deal stood, they’d call the sales team, forcing reps to spend 20 minutes digging through notes. With Fathom, they’re now saving about 7.5 hours per day during peak times and 20 to 30 minutes per deal status update. More importantly, they’ve achieved near-perfect month-end forecast accuracy. Fathom has become Netgain’s new baseline. James says their sales team can’t imagine not having an AI tool assist them on their calls. Someone recently asked the team if Netgain really needed the app, and 50 people instantly responded: ‘Yes, we absolutely need Fathom.’”
“Beyond that case study, we’re seeing consistent patterns and feedback from across our user base. They’re saving 6+ hours per week and moving 3× faster from insight to next steps. And 95% of users say Fathom keeps them present in meetings. One of our G2 reviews really captures the sentiment: ‘I’ve tried several AI note-taking apps. Fathom outshines them all. It’s more affordable, incredibly accurate and lightning-fast. Fathom often captures key details and action items I would have missed on my own. I use Fathom multiple times a day, and it’s quickly become an essential tool in my workflow.’”
Funding/Revenue
Are you able to discuss funding and/or revenue metrics? White revealed:
“Absolutely. We closed our $17 million Series A in September 2024, led by Telescope Partners. What made this round really special is that we reserved 10% of it for our users, who invested over $2 million via Wefunder in just two to three weeks. We also had participation from our seed investors including Maven Ventures, Character, Active Capital and Rackhouse Ventures. In total, we’ve raised $27 million with over 1,300 individual investors.”
“On revenue, we’ve seen 90x growth over the last two years. While I can’t share exact numbers, I can tell you that this growth has been almost entirely driven by word of mouth and viral adoption, not by the size of our sales team or marketing spend. That’s pretty unusual for a B2B company, but it works because we grow more like a social media platform or B2C product: When you bring Fathom into a meeting with five other people, they all experience its value.”
“Our business model is designed for two groups: people in the meeting who are taking notes while trying to be present, and the management, leadership and founders who aren’t in the meeting but are running teams and trying to understand what’s happening. We give away core note-taking functionality to individual contributors, which drives viral adoption. Who likes taking notes? Nobody. But we monetize the management layer with coaching tools, cross-meeting intelligence, competitive insights and strategic dashboards. The approach has allowed us to scale rapidly while maintaining a generous free tier that gets Fathom into more meetings, which is ultimately our distribution channel.”
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? White assessed:
“The TAM is massive. When we fundraise, we talk about it this way: If you focus on salespeople alone, there are about 10 million in the US. Current competitors are charging around $100 per month, which we think is too expensive by a factor of three to four. If we charge $20 a month, that alone is a massive market.”
“Yet only about 18% of our users are salespeople. So you take that number and 5x it to account for all the other roles using Fathom: customer success, account management, support, agencies, consultants, client services and more. Then 5x it again when you think about expanding from external customer-facing meetings to every internal meeting.”
“Even though there’s decent competition in this space and we think we’re in the pole position, it’s an enormous market. That’s what’s exciting — no matter what position you’re in right now, there’s plenty of room to grow. We’re currently about 60% US and 40% international (primarily Western Europe and Australia). We haven’t yet aggressively targeted other regions, but the global opportunity is enormous when you consider that meetings are universal across all companies, industries and geographies.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? White affirmed:
“A lot of people assume winning in a crowded market means out-featuring the competition. But we’ve taken a fundamentally different approach, focusing on these key areas:
- Transcription accuracy. Since everything else — summaries, action items, insights — builds on the transcript, this gives us a foundational advantage. Fathom is genuinely considered the most accurate transcript out there today. I actually challenge people all the time: Put Fathom against any other tool on the same call, look at the transcripts and tell me somebody else was better. I joke that I’ll give them my house if they find someone better. Many people have come back and said, “I guess you get to keep your house.”
- Reliability and user experience. We invested heavily in these from the beginning. Meetings are time-consuming and stressful, so making Fathom really easy to use was super critical. A lot of competitors have bots that join meetings but then don’t record, or the recording fails. And now, with bot-free capture, users who never wanted a bot in the room don’t have to have one without giving anything up in terms of accuracy or features. We’ve spent enormous effort making sure that when Fathom joins your meeting, it works every single time.
- Deep customization and seamless integration. Sales teams can modify templates to match their specific methodologies, whether it’s MEDDIC, Challenger, SPICED or something unique to their organization. The AI adapts to your business, not the other way around. We’re also platform agnostic; our vision is to get all of your meetings in one place: Zoom, Teams, Google Meet — and soon Slack huddles, FaceTime, whatever you’re using. We’re not locked into any single platform.
- A great free product. We offer an incredibly robust free version with unlimited meetings and five AI summaries per month. Two-thirds of our users are on the free plan, and we’re completely fine with that.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? White emphasized:
“Looking ahead 12 to 18 months, I see two major trajectories for Fathom:”
“First, expanding beyond customer-facing teams to internal meetings. Right now we really focus on customer-facing teams: agencies, client services, people meeting with customers and prospects. That’s where people don’t want to forget what was said and where managers want to know what’s happening. But our goal is to make Fathom the platform you can use across your entire organization, not just on customer-facing teams.”
“Second, building more AI agents and intelligence capabilities. Whether it’s coaching, competitive intelligence or product intelligence, we want Fathom to automatically share the insights coming up in conversations, both internal and external, to the right people in your organization. People want to be smarter, but we’re not getting any more time to be in meetings.”
“We recently introduced one of our biggest platform updates to date, including bot-free capture, account-wide meeting intelligence, and expanded LLM integrations. We’ve also expanded our mobile and in-person meeting capabilities extending Fathom to in-person meetings for the first time”
“Ultimately, our goal is for teams to have fewer meetings and much more visibility into the organization around them as a result of those meetings. Our ultimate vision is ambitious but achievable: a future where just saying something in a meeting can magically will it into existence, without the post-meeting work. And that future is not far away.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? White concluded:
“I’d love to talk about what it’s been like being a second-time founder. I describe it to people as playing an old video game for the first time in a while and being able to speedrun it because you know exactly what to do. When you first do a startup, it’s like dropping into Minecraft. You’re like, “What do I do?” It’s this open-ended world with no instructions. But the second time around, within the first hour you’ve got a castle built because you know exactly what to prioritize.”
“One of the biggest advantages is getting to cherry-pick the best people. Most of Fathom’s initial team were folks I knew from UserVoice, some of my favorite people to work with. It’s really hard to hire your first couple of engineers for your first startup. Starting a company with four of my top engineers from my previous company was just incredible.”
“I also want to emphasize how important our users are. They’re our greatest champions. So much of our growth and success to date is because of their advocacy, both in their meetings and on sites like G2. That’s why it was a no-brainer to include our users in our Series A fundraising at the same terms as our VC partners. The alignment between our users and our business model is rare — and powerful.”
