This $1 billion AI notetaker started with no AI — just India-born CEO and his co-founder taking notes hand

The co-founder of Fireflies AI has revealed that the first prototype of the AI notetaking product did not actually have any AI. Instead, it was just him and his India-born co-founder logging into meetings, manually taking notes hand and emailing them to clients after 10 minutes. Krish Ramineni is the Indian-American CEO and co-founder of Fireflies AI. In essence, it was two “broke guys” pretending to be AI. Two founders and no AISam Udotong, the co-founder and CTO of Fireflies AI, revealed this surprising fact in a LinkedIn post shared yesterday. Fireflies.ai was founded India-born Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong. The company’s roots date to around 2016, when the founders began laying groundwork and iterating on multiple product ideas before settling on the meeting‑assant idea. (Also read: Indian-American Giga CEO accused of snubbing new employee; he quit on Day 1) Early efforts included tools for email prioritisation, Slack message analysis, and other productivity aides — but the founders realised a bigger opportunity lay in meetings. They observed that voice‑conversations and meetings generate huge amounts of data but were poorly structured, which inspired the pivot to a meeting transcription AI tool — except that their first prototype had no AI. Pretending to be AIIn his LinkedIn post, MIT-educated Udotong said that he and his co-founder Krish Ramineni were surviving on pizza and sleeping on couches while chasing their entrepreneurial dreams. Their startup has today reached unicorn status, being valued at over $1 billion — but the start was rocky. “Before I explain how 2 broke guys validated a $1B idea, you need to understand we were couch surfing while desperately chasing our entrepreneurial dreams. An AI notetaker was our last hope after 6 ideas our friends claimed were ‘genius’,” he said. In fact, when Udotong and Ramineni settled on the idea of an AI notetaker, they did not have the funds to actually deploy AI. They told their clients that an AI tool would join their meetings. Instead, he and Ramineni would log into the meetings and take notes hand. “We told our customers there’s an ‘AI that’ll join a meeting.’ In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes hand,” Udotong said in his LinkedIn post. “When customers scheduled a meeting, we’d manually dial in as “Fred from Fireflies.ai” We’d sit there silently, take detailed notes, and send them 10 minutes later,” he revealed. Scaling it to a $1 billion companyThe duo attended more than a 100 meetings this way before they were finally able to afford money to rent a small room in San Francisco — and subsequently automate their product offering. “We were finally able to make enough money to pay the $750/month rent for a tiny SF living room. That was the point when we said let’s stop and automate everything,” Udotong wrote. More about Krish Ramineni and Sam UdotongKrish Ramineni was born in India and moved to the United States when he was five. He grew up there, completing his schooling and later attending the University of Pennsylvania for college. After graduating, he worked as a product manager at Microsoft. Krish’s journey as an entrepreneur began chance during his college years. At UPenn, he met his future co-founder, Sam Udotong, through mutual friends at hackathons and campus events. At the time, they weren’t trying to start a company — they just enjoyed building new things together. Later, after Krish left Microsoft, the two started working on projects for fun. They soon built Fireflies AI — today a unicorn.