Fireflies CEO Krish Ramineni wants to turn its AI notetaker into an ‘action-taker’

Fireflies.ai has built its business around an AI bot that joins meetings, takes notes and remembers what people said. Now, the company wants that bot to stop just listening and start doing the work that follows.

“I am turning Fireflies from a notetaker into an action-taker,” cofounder and CEO Krish Ramineni told the Economic Times Digital in an interview, as the company expands beyond meetings into email, workplace chat, scheduling and other workflows.

“My goal is to build Fireflies into an AI teammate that works across all of the busiest places where you work. Meetings happen to be one of those places. And that’s where we have perfected it over the last couple of years,” Ramineni said.


Over the next year, Fireflies plans to add more than a dozen capabilities beyond meetings, according to Ramineni.

The first step came earlier this month with the launch of Email Assistant, which connects with Gmail and Outlook to triage incoming messages, draft replies and follow up on unanswered emails. According to the company, the assistant can also use information from previous meetings while preparing responses.

For Ramineni, the broader ambition is to move beyond just identifying what needs to be done after a meeting.

“After a meeting, I don’t want just the notes. I don’t want just the action items,” he said. “Can it actually do the action items for me? Make the presentation, make the slide deck, write this brief.”

Fireflies, backed by investors including Khosla Ventures and Canaan Partners, has raised about $19 million till date. The company reached a valuation of $1 billion through a tender offer in June 2025.

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Building the context to act

Ramineni said Fireflies is building a knowledge graph using context from meetings, emails, documents, Slack and other business systems. The aim, he said, is not to create another repository of workplace information, but to use that context to carry out tasks on behalf of users.

“We are not trying to build a CRM or another system of record. What I want to do is actually do the work for you. That context can come from your CRM, your meetings, your emails, the web or wherever it needs to come from,” Ramineni said.

“What I care about is doing the work and pulling in information from all the different places it needs to come from. As it does that work, it will naturally build a second brain as a byproduct,” he added.

He gave the example of an internal analytics system at Fireflies that combines conversations, dashboards and business intelligence tools. Ramineni said he can ask Fireflies how user sign-ups have changed over two months or which acquisition channel is performing best without manually going through different systems.

The company is also betting that its ability to work across software ecosystems can differentiate it from large technology companies like Google and Microsoft building their own workplace assistants.

“When Google builds its AI, it’s going to build it for Google. When Microsoft builds its AI, it’s going to build it for Teams. The advantage of Fireflies is that it works across all of your work systems,” Ramineni said.

“Knowledge is fragmented, and you want one AI that works consistently across all of those platforms,” he added.

More autonomy, but humans still approve

For now, Ramineni said Fireflies is limiting how much autonomy it gives its AI. Its Email Assistant can draft messages but does not send them without user review, while its CRM automation allows information to be pulled from meetings and presented for approval before it is entered into the system.

“There’s always going to be a human review process,” Ramineni said. “I don’t need the AI to go rogue or do dumb things that an agent would do.”

But giving AI more access to workplace conversations and context also raises questions around privacy and consent. Fireflies is currently facing lawsuits in the US under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), alleging that the platform collected voice-related biometric information from meeting participants who had not signed up for the product. Fireflies has disputed key elements of the allegations.

“We’re not training on your voice data,” Ramineni said, adding that the company does not train its models on customer data and has zero-day retention arrangements with AI vendors including OpenAI and Anthropic.

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Fireflies is not alone in facing scrutiny over how AI tools handle consent. Microsoft Teams is facing a class action lawsuit in Illinois over its transcription feature, while Otter.ai and Granola have also faced similar allegations that private conversations were recorded and transcribed without consent from all participants.

India becomes Fireflies’ No. 2 market

India is Fireflies’ second-largest market globally by users, Ramineni said, with the number of paid organisations using the platform in the country tripling over the past two years.

“India is one of our fastest-growing markets. After the US, it is number two in terms of users,” he said.

While India trails some markets on monetisation, Ramineni said India is among the top 10 countries contributing to Fireflies’ revenue.

The company is also looking at Indian AI firms as it expands further into voice and multilingual use cases, particularly models designed for regional languages, Ramineni said.

“What we are looking for are LLMs specific to regional languages,” Ramineni said. “Because of India’s language diversity, we may have to bring other LLMs or voice models into the mix.”