AI note taking app Fireflies reaches $1B in valuation, partners with Perplexity

AI-powered meeting assistant Fireflies.ai has crossed a $1 billion valuation following its first tender offer. 

The company said the tender offer will provide liquidity to early team members who have been with Fireflies for several years, with the offer being extended to 10–15% of the workforce.

The San Francisco-based startup has also partnered with AI startup Perplexity to add real-time, voice-activated web search into meetings. This joint effort has led to the creation of a new feature called “Talk to Fireflies,” allowing users to pull up information without leaving meetings.

“Fireflies has scaled rapidly over the last couple of years, essentially by establishing ourselves across all the major video conferencing platforms. In India, we have over 50,000 companies using Fireflies, having users from three out of every five unicorns in India. India is probably our second largest market after North America, and has played a big role,” Krish Ramineni, CEO and Co-founder of Fireflies.ai, tells YourStory. 

Ramineni added that the platform will soon support multilingual capabilities, starting with Hindi and expanding to other regional languages in the future.

The AI note-taking app, which is currently used by employees at 75% of Fortune 500 companies, added that it has remained profitable since 2023, while sustaining triple-digit year-over-year growth without raising primary capital since 2021.

The platform claims to have served more than 20 million users across 500,000+ organisations worldwide. Over the past 18 months, its user growth has surged eightfold, driven by the demand for AI tools to streamline meetings and automate workplace workflows.

Its latest feature, Talk to Fireflies, turns the platform into an interactive AI meeting companion. Users can engage with it via voice commands, “Hey Fireflies!” or text prompts, "/ff" during Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams meetings. 

By integrating Perplexity's web search capabilities, users can ask questions and get real-time answers sourced from the internet.

“At Perplexity, we're focused on bringing accurate, real-time answers to people wherever and whenever they’re making decisions,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, Chief Business Officer at Perplexity. 

“Meetings are where critical decisions happen, but they're often information-poor environments. By integrating Perplexity's search capabilities into Fireflies, we're eliminating the need to switch contexts or postpone decisions as workers move to question-first problem-solving,” he added.

The firm said the new feature enables a range of practical use cases, such as conducting industry research during planning, analysing competitive landscapes, or pulling up data to support decision-making, all within the flow of a meeting. 

For instance, users can ask queries such as “Hey Fireflies, what are the latest market trends in online retail?” or “Hey Fireflies, what are the current SEC reporting requirements for private companies?”

Looking ahead, Fireflies said it is building AI voice agents that can attend meetings on a user’s behalf and expanding capabilities for Talk to Fireflies, such as searching across a user's entire meeting database.