Otter.ai has closed $320 million in funding this week. The money comes from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, structured as financing rather than investment. Otter would spend it on sales and marketing, and pays it back with interest as that spending turns into revenue. “We do need to pay them back,” CEO Sam Liang told Reuters.
Otter had previously raised somewhere between $50 million and $73 million in its decade of existence, based on PitchBook’s total, with its last round closed back in 2021. This week’s deal is nearly four to six times everything that came before it, done in a single transaction, with no new valuation attached and no board seat granted.
The company claims the bet is paying off already. Otter now counts more than 40 million users, up from 25 million a year ago, and claims a presence inside 86% of the Fortune 500. It crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue late last year and has transcribed, by its own count, more than a billion meetings. Liang told Reuters enterprise customers are growing faster than anything else at the company and that he expects revenue to climb sharply again in 2026. The new capital is going toward sales hiring, international offices, and a shift away from pure transcription — a pre-meeting brief that pulls context from earlier conversations, and a live assistant users can question mid-call. Otter hired Alex Gay, previously Superhuman’s marketing chief, to run the enterprise push.
However, Otter’s path wouldn’t be too easy. The notetaker needs Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet — the three most popular online meeting platforms — to join in to do its job. However, all three now ship their own built-in AI notetaking. That’s the central problem with selling a feature that lives inside someone else’s software. Then there’s competiton. Fireflies.ai, Granola, Read AI and Fathom are chasing the same enterprise budgets Otter wants, and newer entrants like Calendly and Wispr are starting to show up in the same deals too.
Otter is also defending the exact feature it’s now betting its enterprise future on. A proposed class action filed in California in August 2025, Brewer v. Otter.ai, claims the company’s notetaker joins Zoom, Meet and Teams calls and records everyone on them — including people who’ve never used Otter and never agreed to anything — then feeds those recordings into training its speech models. The lead plaintiff wasn’t an Otter customer at all; he found out a meeting had been recorded after the fact.