[ad_1]
Earlier this week, the founder of an AI transcription company called Fireflies admitted on LinkedIn that his AI app wasn’t actually AI. Sam Udotong, the CTO and co-founder of Fireflies, said in a post that its $100/month AI transcription service was actually “just two guys surviving on pizza” when it launched. According to the post, Udotong and his co-founder and CEO Krish Ramineni would log on to early clients’ meetings and take notes by hand rather than use artificial intelligence.
LinkedIn comments criticized Udotong for the practice, raising concerns about privacy violations, data security, and misleading customers.
When Inc asked Fireflies for clarification CEO Krish Ramineni backtracked on the statement Udotong made on LinkedIn. Ramineni told Inc that the duo asked “ten friends what they would pay for an “EA-as-a-service” that combined AI with a human in the loop.” Ramineni says “we only raised our seed round after we validated the automated tech and showed real traction.”
“From the beginning the platform has operated with no human reviewers, no human in the loop, and no third-party labeling vendors,” he adds. Seemingly backtracking Udotong’s statements that the “AI that’ll join a meeting” was in reality “me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand.”
Fireflies’ product might not be the only questionable part of its business. This summer, the company stated it had a one billion dollar valuation (as Udotong alludes to in his post) following a tender offer, where early employees sell their stake in the company to outside investors. The thing is, tender offers don’t typically create unicorns: That happens when primary funding rounds reach one billion or more.
But the company’s Pitchbook profile last valued them at about $72 million. Around the time Fireflies posted its unicorn status, it raised an undisclosed sum from the future of work focused F7 ventures. But F7 typically invests about $3.7 million on an average funding round.
When asked for clarification Ramineni doubled down that the valuation “came from a tender offer we facilitated so early employees could get some liquidity.” Fireflies isn’t the only company to ride the AI boom by selling what seems to have been vaporware as artificial intelligence. Builder.ai, a platform that purported to use AI to help build apps, went bankrupt earlier this year when it was revealed the platform was actually just engineers in India. Last year, Amazon Go stores with cashier-less checkout, which were supposed to use machine learning to detect purchases, were actually just functioning based on an army of 1,000 outsourced workers.
The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.
[ad_2]
Tekendra Parmar
Source link