Today, Read AI, Inc. exits stealth mode with the launch of Read Dashboard, a real-time shared dashboard that measures engagement and sentiment for meeting attendees. Read, which delivers better meetings through measurement, also announced a $10 million seed round led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from PSL Ventures and notable angels. It is the company’s first financing round.

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“No one wants to participate in a bad meeting. Bad meetings waste time and impact morale, yet studies show at least half of meetings are classified as unproductive”

Read Dashboard

“No one wants to participate in a bad meeting. Bad meetings waste time and impact morale, yet studies show at least half of meetings are classified as unproductive,” said David Shim, Co-Founder and CEO of Read. “Read Dashboard is ‘Waze for meetings,’ providing real-time transparency for meeting leaders and participants to understand how the meeting is really going. Are people engaged? Are they frustrated? Are they feeling productive? This gives every attendee the ability to gauge meeting success, and collectively empowers them to collaborate to create more productive interactions.”

The experienced co-founders are led by serial entrepreneur and former CEO of Foursquare, David Shim. Shim is teamed up with longtime colleagues and co-founders of Read, Rob Williams (VP of Engineering) and Elliott Waldron (VP of Data Science). The three previously built Placed into the industry leader in location analytics, which was acquired by Snapchat in 2017, and spun out into Foursquare in 2019.

“Over the past 18 months society has seen a seismic shift in the way we interact – where in-person meetings are now digital, and where the future of work is hybrid. In a digital first world, Read is set to be that intelligent application that ushers in video conferencing 2.0,” said Matt McIlwain, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group. “David, Elliott and Rob have proven their ability to build privacy first solutions that can make markets more effective and efficient. In the same way there is a dashboard in every car, Read Dashboard should be in every meeting.”

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Transparency and Privacy

Read is built on the foundation of collaboration, transparency, and privacy. In every meeting, Read Dashboard notifies attendees that it is participating in the conversation and provides direct access to meeting metrics to all attendees encouraging collaboration. Read Dashboard offers a simple opt-out function available to anyone in the meeting – and, if invoked, Read immediately exits the conversation. Read does not provide meeting playback in the form of recorded or transcribed conversations.

$10 Million Seed Round

Read also announced that it has raised a $10MM seed round. The round was oversubscribed and was led by Madrona Venture Group, with Matt McIlwain joining the Board of Directors, with participation from PSL Ventures (Julie Sandler), David Joerg (Former Placed Board Member), Imran Khan (CEO of Verishop, Former CSO at Snapchat), Oren Etzioni (CEO at AI2), Bill Richter (CEO of Qumulo), Shane Atchison (CEO of Wunderman), Brian Ma (Founder of Divvy), Peter Sellis (VP of Product at Snapchat), Nima Khajehnouri (VP of Engineering at Snapchat), and other strategic angels.

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