Superhuman Buys Fathom So AI Can Turn Meetings Into Finished Work

Superhuman, the company behind the popular email app, just bought Fathom, a startup whose AI sits in your video calls, records them, and writes up notes and action items. Fathom launched in 2020, raised more than $30 million, and was valued at $94 million in 2024. Its free plan proved popular: 400,000 people use it every month, and over a million have recorded meetings with it.

Here's the bigger idea behind the deal. Most AI tools today wait for you to type a request. The next wave is AI that starts work on its own — and meetings are where work actually gets decided. If software already knows what you promised on a call, it can draft the follow-up email, update your customer records, and book the next meeting without being asked. Superhuman already sells email, documents, a calendar, a database, and an AI "agent builder" (software that takes actions for you). The notetaker becomes the piece that links them all together.

Superhuman didn't build this itself. It quietly tested its own notetaker with some users, then decided buying a finished product was faster and better. CEO Shishir Mehrotra admitted recording meetings well is "actually quite tricky." Fathom's CEO, Richard White, said Superhuman's 40 million users were the main draw — instant reach he couldn't build alone.

The catch? This space is crowded. Rivals like Granola, Read AI, and Wispr have raised millions, and Fathom's famously generous free plan may not survive new ownership. There's also a privacy trade-off: an AI listening to every meeting holds a lot of sensitive information in one place, and software that acts on its own can also send the wrong email or book the wrong thing.