San Francisco-based startup Hugo announced the closure of a $6.1 million seed financing round on Wednesday. The round was led by Gradient Ventures, with additional participation from Slack Fund, Founder Collective and Entrée Capital.
Hugo is a collaborative meeting notes platform focused on sharing information across teams within companies. The platform integrates with more than 20 other workflow and video conferencing applications including Slack, Asana, Github and Zoom. Teams that use Hugo can set shared meeting agendas, assign action items to their peers and share collaborative notes, all in one place.
"The way we meet dictates the way we work,” Josh Lowy, CEO and co-founder of Hugo, said in a statement. “Everyone already plans for and takes notes in meetings. Hugo supercharges that behavior for better alignment and productivity, especially when we can’t all be in the same room.”
Hugo’s platform was initially intended to squash meeting culture because “improving teamwork means better meetings, not more meetings,” as Lowy described in a Built In interview earlier this year. This mission could be of vital use to companies that have made the transition to working remotely in light of COVID-19.
“There’s a stronger need for asynchronous communication, the volume of meetings has increased and what we do has, if anything, gotten more valuable,” Darren Chait, COO and co-founder of Hugo, said in a statement to TechCrunch.
The platform is free for up to 40 users, charges a flat fee of $399 for up to 100 users and relies on custom pricing beyond that. The company counts Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, Adobe and Dropbox among its customers.
"Hugo is building the intelligent source of truth for meeting alignment and collaboration ... whether you’re in sales, support, finance, or strategy,” Darian Shirazi, general partner at Gradient Ventures, said in a statement.
Hugo plans on using the seed funding to expand operations around the world and accelerate product development of new features that assist clients with their meeting workflow.
