Pocket raises $11M in bet on rising demand for AI note-taking devices

Unlike AI gadgets like Rabbit or Humane, companies building dedicated gadgets for recording and transcribing meetings have actually seen some traction. The market is huge — though a bit constrained, as smartphones work fine for such tasks when paired with note-taking apps — and startups like Plaud, Mobvoi, Anker, Viaim, and Vibe have jumped in to take advantage.

In this crowded market, Y Combinator-backed Pocket thinks it can win with its design, packaging, and pricing. The company sells a $129 credit card-shaped puck, which sticks to the back of your phone, and promises unlimited recordings, transcriptions, and to-do items, no subscription required.

The startup says it has sold more than 130,000 units since launching last year, and that momentum has now helped it score $11 million in funding from Accel, Y Combinator, and ElevenLabs CEO and co-founder Mati Staniszewski.

Pocket’s core idea isn’t novel: You stick the puck to the back of your phone, turn on recording during a meeting, and it’ll record and transcribe your conversations.

Users can then ask the accompanying phone app to generate summaries of meetings, ask an AI assistant questions about meetings, create mind maps, and transform the text into different templates.

While the basic transcription comes free with the puck, the company sells a $200-per-year plan to unlock unlimited AI summaries, queries to the AI assistant, daily highlights, and file attachments.

“You can record on the go, offline, and in the field, which is exactly how lawyers, salespeople, doctors, real estate agents, construction workers, and students use Pocket today,” Accel partner Cecilia Wang said. “Not only are people present rather than shifting focus to take notes, but more information and insights also get captured than ever before, which otherwise would have been lost. Over time, that accumulation of insights is really valuable: one central place where your ideas, conversations, and thoughts live, rather than scattered and lost,” Wang said.

Pocket was founded by Akshay Narisetti, who was a founding member of rival note-taking startup Omi; and Gabriel Dymowski, who previously founded a blockchain-based document management startup.

“We thought every meeting notetaker was built for online conversations, but nothing was geared towards real-life talk. AI really needs a lot of context to work better for us, and a lot of that context exists offline,” Narisetti told TechCrunch.

For its enterprise customers, Pocket offers custom workflow management, webhook support, and integration with apps such as Google Calendar, OneDrive, Google Drive, Obsidian, Claude, and Cursor. Plus, there is a model context protocol (MCP) server to connect its AI assistant to other databases.

Like other meeting notetakers, Pocket wants to help people automate tasks like drafting emails, updating CRMs, and creating action items based on meetings. The company is banking on shipping software fast to enable these integrations.

Devices like Pocket undoubtedly face competition from software players such as Granola, Zoom, Fireflies, Otter, and Read AI. However, device-first companies like Plaud, which is on track to generate annual revenue of $100 million via software sales, are also building enterprise capacity along with desktop apps for digital meetings.