Superhuman acquired notetaker Fathom; plus, OpenAI bought smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging, and AI infrastructure company Cornelis raised $205M

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1:13That's Framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. Superhuman is joining the cadre of productivity platforms launching node takers, but rather than building one internally, it is acquiring Y Combinator-backed Fathom. AI-powered productivity platforms aim to automate work. Typically, that automation is triggered when a user types prompts and creates workflows. It would be even better, though, if AI could proactively start work. And for that, the topics and action items discussed in meetings are key. Hence, the desire by superhuman and similar platforms to move into note-taking.

1:55To date, Fathom, which was founded in 2020, has raised over$30 million in funding, and it was valued at$94 million in 2024. That's according to PitchBook. Its investors include Zoom Apps Fund, Telescope Partners, BoxOne Ventures, Character Capital, and Maven Ventures. Its cap table also includes individuals such as Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt. The note-taker offers a generous free plan and that has resulted in over 400 ,000 monthly active users. The company said that over 1 million people have recorded meetings until now. TechCrunch learned that earlier this year, Superhuman tested a note-taker internally with select users, but eventually chose to acquire a finished product to integrate with its productivity suite with AI at the center.

2:51Shashir Mehrotra, Superhuman's CEO, acknowledged that, and he said in the process of testing, the company realized how hard it really is to create a note-taker. He said, 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. 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. Marotra said that he was impressed with some of the technical intricacies built by the Fathom team, but did not elaborate on which ones.

3:32He did tease that with a note-taker, Superhuman can work on surfacing meeting context in real time. Competition in the meeting note-taker space is intense, and startups like Granola, Read AI, and new entrant Whisper have raised millions of dollars to aid that growth. Despite having a healthy customer base or revenue run rate, venture-backed note-takers are feeling the heat from the markets to do more than just note-taking. Some of those factors do matter in Superhuman acquiring Fathom, while Fathom's CEO Richard White said that Superhuman's 40 million user base was a good opportunity to reach users at scale.

4:14He added, the reach of Superhuman is massive. 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. On the platform front, Superhuman already has an email client, a docs app, a calendar, a database solution, and a newly launched AI agent builder platform. With a meeting note-taker in the middle, Superhuman can draft emails, update data entries, schedule follow-up meetings, and have AI agents start work and extract insights from meeting data.

4:57OpenAI bought smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging in a deal worth over$300 million. That's according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The company, founded in 2019 and based in Los Altos, California, had previously raised about$30 million in funding from investors. Glass Imaging was founded by Zivatar and Tom Bishop, a pair of former Apple engineers, who previously led the team that developed Apple's portrait mode. Now, this background directly informs the work they now do at Glass Imaging, where they use AI to overcome the physical size constraints of smartphone cameras. Rather than using AI to edit a photo after it's been taken, Glass Imaging uses neural networks to learn about individual camera systems, like the different cameras on various smartphone models, to yield better images from the moment the shutter clicks.

5:49OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The chat GPT maker is rumored to be working on its own hardware, such as smartphones, earbuds, and AI companion devices. Back in 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and famed Apple designer Johnny Ive revealed that they had been working together on a device startup called I.O. when OpenAI bought Ive's company for$6.5 billion.

6:22Cornelis, a company creating networking technology to help AI chips communicate more effectively, announced on Monday that it has raised$205 million in a funding round led by IAG Capital Partners. It also announced a product called Active Compute Fabric, a network technology that targets the fact that much GPU time is wasted waiting for the data to arrive. Cornelis hopes to address this with a networking fabric that lets chips process and send information at the same time. The company, which spun off from Intel back in 2020, is competing with NVIDIA by offering an open architecture, meaning customers can use a variety of GPU and accelerator hardware with Cornelis' networking fabric.

7:08Though NVIDIA chips can technically run on other networking fabrics, they're optimized to run on NVIDIA's own software, making it much easier and more enticing for customers to use NVIDIA's full GPU stack. Cornelis is part of a new wave of AI infrastructure companies emerging to break apart NVIDIA's market dominance, piece by piece or chip by chip, one could say. Cornelis has already started shipping its product and is working on a new generation of it, expected to be released later on this year. That's all for now. For the latest in startup technology, head to techcrunch.com.

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