Startup Deep Dive : Avoma — no new funding since 2021, still growing

Avoma has not announced a new funding round since December 2021. In the four years since, the startup has grown from 15 employees to 66, built a product used by sales, customer success and marketing teams at hundreds of companies, and picked up a 4.6-out-of-5 rating across more than 1,350 reviews on G2 — all without the fresh venture capital that usually bankrolls this kind of expansion.

The bigger surprise is where the work actually happens. Avoma calls itself a Palo Alto startup, but its co-founder and chief technology officer, Devendra Laulkar, builds the product from Pune. Avoma’s real test was never raising money. It was staying relevant once Zoom and Microsoft started giving away, inside subscriptions people already paid for, the exact feature Avoma once charged for.

Quick facts

What they do

Avoma builds software that sits inside a company’s video calls. It joins a Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet meeting as a bot, records and transcribes the conversation, and then turns that transcript into automated notes, action items and CRM updates. On top of that transcription layer it sells conversation intelligence — searchable call libraries, talk-time and objection-handling analytics, coaching scorecards — and revenue intelligence, which forecasts deal risk from what was actually said on a call rather than what a rep typed into a pipeline field. The buyer is a customer-facing team: sales, customer success, marketing or product, at startups and mid-market companies rather than the largest enterprises Gong tends to sign.

The origin

Aditya Kothadiya had already sold a startup once before he built Avoma. In 2008 he co-founded Shopalize, a social-commerce tool that helped online retailers turn shopper activity into sharing and word of mouth. Customer-engagement company [24]7.ai bought Shopalize in March 2013, largely for its work on customer conversations across Twitter and Facebook, and Kothadiya spent the next four years inside [24]7.ai as director and then senior director of product management, watching thousands of customer conversations pass through the company’s systems.

The idea for Avoma came from a much smaller, more personal frustration: sitting in his own meetings and realising he was not actually listening, because he was busy taking notes. He left [24]7.ai in 2017 and, with Devendra Laulkar — a Pune-based engineer who had previously co-founded Vessel, acquired by Marketo, and worked on mobile at Pulse, acquired by LinkedIn — set out to build what they called, plainly, “A Very Organized Meeting Assistant.” The name became the product: Avoma.

The struggle years

Avoma spent its first two and a half years without a dollar of outside funding, a fact confirmed by its own seed announcement, which describes the company as “2+ years” old when it raised its first capital in January 2020. Through that stretch the team stayed small enough that, by its own account at the time of its next raise, headcount was still under eight people as late as December 2021 — four years after founding. For an AI company built during the 2018–2021 run-up in venture funding for exactly this category, that is a slow, self-financed build, not a rocket-fuelled one.

The second, sharper test arrived just as the money did. Avoma closed its $12 million Series A in December 2021, at the very top of the SaaS funding cycle. Within a year, the market it had just raised money to attack turned over: Avoma’s own year-in-review post for 2023 describes the industry moving from “burn fast, grow faster” to “grow sustainably,” with profitability replacing growth-at-all-costs as the metric that mattered to the investors and boards above it. Rather than raise a Series B into a cooling market, Avoma spent 2023 rebuilding itself around a revenue intelligence platform aimed at sales and customer-success teams — a deliberate pivot away from being just a meeting note-taker, made without a fresh funding round to cushion it.

That funding round has still not come. As of September 2026, Crunchbase and Tracxn both record Avoma’s most recent institutional raise as the December 2021 Series A — meaning the company has financed roughly four years of product expansion, headcount growth and a full platform repositioning entirely from its own revenue.

The turning point

If there is a single hinge in Avoma’s history, it is that December 2021 raise. Before it: a company of fewer than eight people, three years into building a product with no institutional capital beyond a $3 million seed round. After it: $12 million in new capital from Headline, Storm Ventures, Global Founder Capital, the Zoom Apps Fund, Operator Partners and Industry Ventures, a team that had already grown to 15 and a stated plan to quadruple headcount within twelve months. Avoma’s own announcement, backed by TechCrunch’s reporting at the time, put a number on the growth that justified the round: 400 percent annual revenue growth for three consecutive years, company-stated and not independently audited, alongside more than 300 paying customers and “tens of thousands” of individual professionals using the product.

The round did not just buy headcount. It bought the company time to make the harder bet that followed a year later — that it needed to become more than a note-taker before Zoom and Microsoft made note-taking free.

The money behind it

Avoma has raised $15 million in total, across two disclosed rounds. Neither round’s valuation has been made public, and no round has followed the Series A as of September 2026.

• Seed — $3 million, announced January 2020. Led by K9 Ventures, an early Twilio investor, with participation from TSVC, HubSpot Ventures, Dragon Capital and unnamed angel investors (Avoma company blog, January 2020).
• Series A — $12 million, announced 22 December 2021. Led by growth investor Headline, with Storm Ventures, Global Founder Capital, the Zoom Apps Fund, Operator Partners and Industry Ventures joining existing backers K9 Ventures, Dragon Capital and Twin Ventures (Avoma company blog and TechCrunch, both December 2021).
• What each backer changed: K9 Ventures’ early conviction — the firm has said it saw Avoma as an “intelligence layer for conversations” comparable to Twilio’s role in communications — anchored the seed round before Avoma had scale to point to. Headline’s Series A led with growth-stage discipline behind Avoma’s claimed 400 percent revenue growth, and the Zoom Apps Fund’s participation reflected Avoma’s dependence on the Zoom App Marketplace as a distribution channel, a relationship the built-in Zoom AI Companion would later complicate.
• Total raised: $15 million. No priced valuation has been disclosed for either round, and no follow-on round has been reported as of September 2026 (Crunchbase, Tracxn).

How it makes money

Avoma is a straightforward per-seat SaaS business, not a take-rate or transaction model. It sells tiered monthly subscriptions per user, then layers paid add-on modules on top of the base meeting-assistant product (pricing as published on Avoma’s site and reviewed by pricing tracker Claap, 2026):

• Startup plan: $19 per user per month, billed annually — core recording, transcription and AI note-taking.
• Organization plan: $29 per user per month, billed annually — adds team collaboration and coaching features.
• Enterprise plan: $39 per user per month, billed annually only — adds enterprise administration and support.
• Conversation Intelligence add-on: $29 per user per month annually (or $35 monthly) — call analytics, talk-time tracking and searchable call libraries.
• Revenue Intelligence add-on: $29 per user per month annually (or $35 monthly) — deal-risk scoring and forecasting signals pulled from call content.
• Lead Router add-on: $19 per user per month annually (or $25 monthly) — routes inbound leads based on meeting and CRM data.

The part buyers most often get wrong is treating the $19 headline price as the real cost. A seat with both the Conversation Intelligence and Revenue Intelligence add-ons — the combination most sales teams actually want — runs to roughly $77 to $87 per seat per month before any bundling discount, according to Claap’s 2026 breakdown of Avoma’s published pricing; Avoma does offer 10 to 15 percent off for teams that buy two or three add-ons together, and up to 33 percent off for annual billing. There is a 14-day free trial of the Organization plan, but unlike rival Fireflies, no permanent free tier. The margin, as with most seat-based SaaS, sits in the add-on attach rate: the base transcription product is close to commoditized, so the money is made by upselling the same seat into conversation and revenue intelligence.

The numbers

Avoma is a privately held US company and publishes no audited revenue or profit figures, so there is no multi-year statement to reproduce the way an Indian MCA filing or a DRHP would allow. What can be verified, from company statements and third-party trackers opened this month, are a small number of growth proxies over time:

Read plainly, the pattern is a company that roughly quadrupled headcount between 2021 and 2026 without adding a dollar of new institutional capital, which only works if revenue, not funding, covered the difference — consistent with, though not proof of, the growth claims made at the time of the Series A.

Where the money comes from

Avoma does not publish a geographic or segment revenue split, so this section is necessarily about product and buyer mix rather than audited numbers.

• Buyer mix by function: sales teams remain the core buyer, but Avoma explicitly also sells to customer success, marketing and product teams — a broader net than Gong, which is positioned mainly around sales leadership and forecasting (company materials; G2 competitive comparisons, 2026).
• Product mix: revenue is split between the base meeting-assistant subscription (transcription, notes, recording) and the higher-margin Conversation Intelligence and Revenue Intelligence add-ons, which the company has been pushing since its 2023 “revenue intelligence platform” repositioning.
• Distribution: a meaningful share of adoption runs through the Zoom App Marketplace and direct integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot and Teams — a channel the Zoom Apps Fund itself backed as a Series A investor.
• The surprise: engineering headcount is not concentrated where the company is headquartered. Its CTO and core engineering function are based in Pune, India, making Avoma’s cost base considerably more India-weighted than its “Palo Alto startup” branding suggests, even though its revenue is earned almost entirely in US dollars from US and other developed-market customers.

The risks

• Recording-consent and wiretap exposure. Thirteen US states require all-party consent to record a call, and violating that law is a felony in eight of them (RecordingLaw.com, 2026). The exposure is not hypothetical for this category: In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation (N.D. Cal., No. 5:25-cv-06911) consolidated four class-action suits filed in August and September 2025 alleging Otter’s AI notetaker joined calls and used recordings for AI training without proper consent, and Fireflies.AI has separately been sued under Illinois’ biometric privacy law. Courts are reportedly applying a “capability test” that can treat a vendor as an unauthorized third party simply for having the technical ability to use call data for model training — a standard that applies to any AI meeting-assistant vendor, Avoma included, regardless of whether it has itself been sued.
• Being out-bundled by the platforms it depends on. Avoma’s bot joins meetings hosted on Zoom, Teams and Google Meet — platforms that are now selling AI meeting notes themselves. Zoom AI Companion’s core features are included at no extra charge on eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans, which start at $14.16 per user per month; Microsoft 365 Copilot adds meeting notes for $30 per user per month on top of an existing Microsoft 365 subscription (Coommit, 2026). Either can cover basic transcription and summaries for less than Avoma’s own $19 entry price, without asking a customer to add a third-party bot to their calls at all.
• Add-on pricing creates room for undercutting. Because Avoma’s real cost to a sales team runs to roughly $77 to $87 per seat per month once Conversation Intelligence and Revenue Intelligence are added, it sits well above cheaper transcription-first rivals such as Fireflies, priced from $10 per user per month, while still charging a fraction of Gong’s reported $150 to $250 per user all-in pricing once platform fees are included. That middle position is exposed on both sides if either low-end rivals add coaching features or Gong drops price to defend its base.

The takeaway

The lesson in Avoma’s numbers is not about fundraising discipline, though four years without a new round is unusual for a venture-backed AI company. It is about timing a pivot before the market forces it on you. Avoma’s founding product — a bot that joins your call and writes it up — was always going to become a checkbox feature inside Zoom and Microsoft’s own subscriptions eventually; the only real question was whether Avoma would move up the stack, into coaching and revenue intelligence, before or after that happened. The 2023 shift, made quietly and without a funding cushion, looks like it was made just in time rather than in response to the free competition that followed. The transferable lesson: when your core feature is one product release away from being bundled for free into somebody else’s platform, the moment to build the next layer up is before your customers notice they no longer need to pay you for the first one.

Frequently asked questions

What does Avoma do?

Avoma is an AI meeting assistant that joins video calls on Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, records and transcribes them, and generates automated notes, action items and CRM updates. It also sells conversation intelligence (searchable call analytics and coaching) and revenue intelligence (deal-risk forecasting from call content) as add-ons.

Who founded Avoma and when?

Avoma was founded in 2017 in Palo Alto, California, by Aditya Kothadiya (CEO), Devendra Laulkar (CTO, based in Pune, India) and Albert Lai (Head of AI). Kothadiya had previously co-founded Shopalize, sold to [24]7.ai in March 2013.

How much funding has Avoma raised?

Avoma has raised $15 million in total: a $3 million seed round led by K9 Ventures in January 2020, and a $12 million Series A led by Headline in December 2021. No further institutional round has been reported as of September 2026.

Is Avoma an Indian company?

Avoma is legally a US company, incorporated and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It is Indian-founded in part, however: co-founder and CTO Devendra Laulkar is based in Pune, and Avoma maintains an engineering team there, alongside CEO Aditya Kothadiya’s India-linked founder background.

How does Avoma make money?

Avoma sells per-seat SaaS subscriptions starting at $19 per user per month, plus paid add-ons for Conversation Intelligence and Revenue Intelligence at roughly $29 per user per month each, meaning a fully-featured seat typically costs $77 to $87 per user per month.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. All monetary figures in this article are in US dollars; Avoma is a US-incorporated private company and does not publish figures in Indian rupees, so no currency conversion has been applied.

• TechCrunch, “Avoma puts new capital to use making meetings work smarter,” December 2021
• Avoma company blog, “Avoma raises $12M to build the most comprehensive Meeting Lifecycle Assistant,” December 2021
• Avoma company blog, “Introducing Avoma and announcing our Seed funding,” January 2020
• Avoma company blog, “2023 Year in Review: A round-up of Avoma’s product updates,” 2023
• Avoma company blog, G2 reviews analysis (4.6/5 across 1,352 reviews), 2026
• Avoma company page, avoma.com/company, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Avoma company profile (employee count as of 31 August 2026, founding and funding data), accessed September 2026
• GetLatka, Avoma company profile (ARR estimate, June 2024), accessed September 2026
• Wellfound, Devendra Laulkar profile (career background), accessed September 2026
• Medium, Aditya Kothadiya, “Here is how we sold our startup — Shopalize,” accessed September 2026
• Claap, “Avoma Pricing: How Much Does It Cost in 2026?”, 2026
• RecordingLaw.com, “AI Meeting Recording Laws by State: Complete Guide (2026),” 2026, including details of In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation (N.D. Cal., No. 5:25-cv-06911)
• Coommit, “Zoom AI Companion vs Gemini vs Copilot: 2026 Showdown,” 2026
• Crunchbase, Avoma organization profile (funding history), accessed September 2026

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