Superhuman is joining the ranks of productivity platforms with notetakers, but instead of building one from scratch, it's acquiring Y Combinator-backed Fathom. The move underscores a growing trend: AI-powered productivity platforms want to automate work not just when prompted, but proactively. And for that, meeting context - topics, action items - is key.

Fathom, founded in 2020, has raised over $30 million and was valued at $94 million in 2024, per PitchBook. Its investors include Zoom Apps Fund, Telescope Partners, BoxOne Ventures, and Maven Ventures. The cap table also features Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt. Not bad for a company that records your meetings.

Fathom offers a generous free plan, which has attracted over 400,000 monthly active users. The company says more than 1 million people have recorded meetings to date. That's a lot of awkward silences and "can you hear me?" moments.

TechCrunch learned that earlier this year, Superhuman tested a notetaker internally with select users, but ultimately decided to buy a finished product to integrate with its AI-centric productivity suite. CEO Shishir Mehrotra admitted as much, saying the testing process revealed just how hard it is to build a notetaker. "We've been working internally on this area for a while as well. I think it greatly increased our confidence in the demand in this category," Mehrotra told TechCrunch. "It also becomes very clear how deep the products in this category are and how much you need to build. A lot of these products make the job feel really easy, but it's actually quite tricky to do a great job in all parts [of meeting recording]."

Mehrotra praised Fathom's technical intricacies but didn't specify which ones. He did hint that with a notetaker, Superhuman can surface meeting context in real time. Because nothing says productivity like AI eavesdropping on your stand-up.

The meeting notetaker space is crowded, with startups like Granola, Read AI, and newcomer Wispr raising millions. Despite healthy user bases or revenue, venture-backed notetakers face pressure to do more than just take notes. That pressure played a role in Superhuman's acquisition, while Fathom CEO Richard White saw Superhuman's 40 million user base as a distribution goldmine. "The reach of Superhuman is massive," White said. "I have always thought about M&A in terms of speed of building a product that everyone uses, and a part of that comes down to distribution. If we were to operate Fathom as a standalone company, we would have to build a lot of things that are already in the Superhuman platform."

Superhuman already offers an email client, docs app, calendar, database solution, and a newly launched AI agent builder platform. With a notetaker in the middle, Superhuman can draft emails, update data entries, schedule follow-ups, and have AI agents extract insights from meeting data. So your meetings will now not only be recorded but also acted upon - whether you like it or not.