Exclusive: Atlassian acquires Rewatch as it gets into AI meeting bots

Atlassian on Thursday announced that it has acquired Rewatch, an AI-powered meeting notetaker, screen recording tool and video hub. The company plans to integrate Rewatch into Loom, the asynchronous video messaging platform it acquired for $975 million last October. But maybe even more importantly, it also plans to integrate it into its recently launched Rovo AI platform so that meeting notes can quickly become Jira issues, for example, and the transcripts become searchable within the overall business context.

The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. Back in the heady days of early 2021, when everybody was seemingly looking for better video-centric solutions, Rewatch raised a $20 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company did not raise any additional funding since, according to Crunchbase.

As Loom co-founder Joe Thomas told me in an exclusive interview ahead of Thursday’s announcement, Loom already offered an integration with Zoom to record meetings and create transcripts. But that only felt tangential to what the company was trying to do with Loom, he said.

“It was worth evolving our platform and bringing in great IP from Rewatch to accelerate our efforts there,” Thomas sad. “The reason why we got so excited about Rewatch is the fact that we believe Atlassian is disproportionately positioned to take meeting recordings and maximize the value of them. This is because Loom already generates transcripts for every single video that’s created and then we layer all the AI prompts around it — part of Rovo is that it is a unified search [platform] across an enterprise and it’s also building on top of it.”

Loom and Rewatch share a common investor in Andreessen Horowitz; Thomas and Rewatch founder Connor Sears occasionally found themselves in the same meetings a few years ago. But it was Atlassian’s corporate development team that first met with Rewatch and then asked Thomas to meet up with the company, too.

Thomas believes that integrating Rewatch’s tech stack will actually be quite straightforward, especially now that Loom has moved its stack over to the Atlassian platform.

The real challenge now is to provide the best user experience, he said. Once an agent joins a meeting, it has to understand a lot of context; even though this will be a human-in-the-loop system, it still has to get it right most of the time. If it constantly suggests the wrong action items after a meeting, for example, users will quickly give up on it.

“Rovo and agents is, I think, relatively technically complex but also end-user complex in terms of, OK, if we are talking about a Confluence Doc, what parts of that am I updating? What is actually valuable for an end user or meeting attendees to do on their behalf, from an AI agent perspective? That is something that is relatively new for a lot of us at Atlassian. … I think that that’ll probably take a good six to 12 months to really lock in on that front, with a lot of experiments between now and then,” Thomas said.

One other Rewatch feature that Atlassian was especially interested in is its calendar integration. The Rewatch team made that a very straightforward experience, where users can simply toggle the meeting bot on and off for each meeting. Rewatch also features a number of automation features that, for example, send out the meeting notes to every attendee. Indeed, Thomas noted that while the Rewatch team faced a lot of challenges in building the product, building the calendar integration meant dealing with more edge cases and more friction than building most other parts of the Rewatch stack.

Once the integration is complete, the Loom AI agent will be able to join Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams meetings. It’ll create a full transcript, meeting notes and action items that it can then automatically correlate to Confluence pages, Jira issues and service tickets.

He noted that Loom’s mission remains to empower effective communication via video messages at work. Loom has over 31 million registered users and 360 million videos live on the platform. Together, they have seen over a billion views. Clearly, that’s something Atlassian is trying to lean into, but the company is also smartly expanding beyond this core feature of asynchronous messaging by looking at some of the other ways that videos — and their transcripts — are generated within a business context.