Hugo, the connected meeting notes platform, today announced that Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused investment fund, led the company’s recent $6.1M seed financing round with participation from Slack Fund, Founder Collective and Entrée Capital.
“The most important conversations and decisions in every business come from meetings,” said Darian Shirazi, general partner at Gradient Ventures. “As the world embraces new models for working remotely, Hugo is building the intelligent source of truth for meeting alignment and collaboration. Whether you’re in sales, support, finance, or strategy, Hugo keeps teams in sync by centralizing meeting insights and automating outcomes through smart integrations to other best-in-class collaboration tools.”
“Meetings are an untapped source of team discussion, decision-making and progress,” added Jason Spinell, who invests and manages the Slack Fund. “The market is hungry for tools that help teams turn meetings into an opportunity for collaboration – especially in a world where remote work is so prolific. Just as Slack connects us to our colleagues and tools through an innovative collaborative interface, Hugo does the same with meeting notes. We believe Hugo will quickly become the go-to solution for organizations that want their teams to be more aligned and their meetings more productive.”
Each year, unproductive meetings cost an estimated $37 billion. Hugo changes this by bringing your calendar, chat and productivity apps into the note-taking experience for your team, transforming meeting insights into action through integrations with more than 20 apps including Asana, Jira, Salesforce, Slack and Zoom. Since founding, the company has powered hundreds of thousands of meetings for some of the world’s best-known companies, including Adobe, Dropbox, Netflix, Shopify, Spotify and Twitter.
Hugo’s customers consistently report it leading to fewer, higher quality meetings and as having a tremendous impact on alignment and the way their teams work.
“We’re in a meeting-driven world. Team agendas and notes that sync with our calendars have shifted the way we work, towards being super organized, diligent and most importantly, connected,” said Nick Valluri, strategic alliances manager at Zapier. “That’s not only great for efficiency, but also from a culture standpoint since meetings are at the core of transparency and teamwork.”
Hugo will use the new capital to service its fast-growing list of customers, expand Hugo’s global team and accelerate product development of new features that support customers with more of their meeting workflow.
“The way we meet dictates the way we work,” said Josh Lowy, CEO and co-founder of Hugo. “Everyone already plans for and takes notes in meetings. Hugo supercharges that behavior for better alignment and productivity, especially when we can’t all be in the same room. We are looking forward to the next phase of Hugo’s growth – powering meetings that help teams work better together.”
Visit https://www.hugo.team/ to sign up free for Hugo to transform the way your team meets.
About Hugo
San Francisco-based Hugo offers connected meeting notes software. It’s one place for fast-moving teams to set shared meeting agendas, share collaborative meeting notes, and index and organize everything about your meeting based on who attended. Plus, with integrations with 20+ chat, CRM, video conferencing, and project tools, Hugo enables the world’s best companies to manage their meetings with efficiency and transparency. For more, visit www.hugo.team.
About Gradient Ventures
Gradient Ventures is Google’s AI-focused venture fund – investing in and connecting early-stage startups with Google’s resources, innovation, and technical leadership in artificial intelligence. The fund focuses on helping founders navigate the challenges in developing new technology products, allowing companies to take advantage of the latest techniques so that great ideas can come to life. Gradient was founded in 2017 and is based in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit www.gradient.com.
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