Headroom, which uses AI to supercharge videoconferencing, raises $5M – TechCrunch

Videoconferencing has become a cornerstone of how many of us work these days -- so much so that one leading service, Zoom, has graduated into verb status because of how much it's getting used. But does that mean videoconferencing works as well as it should? Today, a new startup called Headroom is coming out of stealth, tapping into a battery of AI tools -- computer vision, natural language processing and more -- on the belief that the answer to that question is a clear -- no bad Wi-Fi interruption here -- "no." Headroom not only hosts videoconferences, but then provides transcripts, summaries with highlights, gesture recognition, optimised video quality and more, and today it's announcing that it has raised a seed round of $5 million as it gears up to launch its freemium service into the world. You can sign up to the waitlist to pilot it, and get other updates here. The funding is coming from Anna Patterson of Gradient Ventures (Google's AI venture fund); Evan Nisselson of LDV Capital (a specialist VC backing companies building visual technologies); Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, now of AME Cloud Ventures; Ash Patel of Morado Ventures; Anthony Goldbloom, the co-founder and CEO of Kaggle.com; and Serge Belongie, Cornell Tech associate dean and professor of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. It's an interesting group of backers, but that might be because the founders themselves have a pretty illustrious background with years of experience using some of the most cutting-edge visual technologies to build other consumer and enterprise services.