Collaborative meeting platform Vowel Inc. launched today as it announced $4.3 million in seed funding.

The round came from Amity Ventures LLC, BoxGroup Ventures LLC, Company Ventures and Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch Interactive Inc., the Amazon.com Inc.-owned the video game streaming platform.

Vowel has developed a meeting platform designed to deliver a video meeting experience that allows groups and individuals to host, plan, record, transcribe and search and share video meetings.

“Earlier this year, we were forced into the world’s largest work-from-home experiment,” said Andrew Berman, chief executive and co-founder of Vowel. “We turned to video conferencing tools to fill a quick void. But as we look ahead to a more permanent future of flexible work, we’ve come to realize we need a lot more than just basic telephone functionality to hold productive meetings.”

Vowel provides a central hub where, the company says, all meeting needs can be met. All the information related to meetings is searchable and actionable, it adds. The platform does this by creating its own transcription so all attendees can participate, instead of needing to take their own notes. Vowel also enables the production of a shared agenda, permitting concrete follow-ups and bullet points for meetings, which can be referenced later.

Action items can also be added during the meeting, which links them back to searchable and sharable records of the meeting. That, the company says, produces a rich environment for every participant, including deeply linkable metadata that not only makes the transcription actionable but also links to the recorded content, making it easier to listen to segments.

Since entire meetings in Vowel keep full transcriptions and can be recorded, attendees and non-attendees can easily refer to them later. That makes meetings more accessible, able to be turned into a library of media that could be used for training or reference purposes.

To get its transcription quality the best it can, Vowel uses Google Transcribe. That means the platform can identify speakers on the fly even in complex conversations and even when people are almost talking over one another, which makes for easy-to-read transcripts of meetings.

Vowel’s integration means there’s less context switching needed. It is possible to start Vowel directly from Slack or Google Calendar and then see meeting summaries via Slack or email. The software also integrates into Jira and Monday.com. and also integrates with GoogleApps, Slack, Jira, Figma, mmhmm and Krisp.

Finally, the platform maintains its own security with state-of-the-art encryption. The software builds upon Google authentication to control access and prevent unwanted attendees from dropping in as well.

“Unproductive meetings have become the status quo for many of us. We keep piling on solutions that promise to make them more collaborative and efficient, but most fail to deliver,” Peter Bell, a general partner at Amity Ventures, said about Vowel’s platform. “That is, until we found Vowel. They’ve created an elegant solution to this age-old problem.”

Over the next year, Vowel intends to extend its integrations to include a multitude of productivity apps and team organization apps to extend its audience across the enterprise. The team wants to increase the number of opportunities for people to reap the benefits of having access to this level of depth when it comes to meeting recollection.

Image: Vowel