Wayra Germany invests in Tucan.ai automated meeting summary software expansion

September 21, 2021
3 min read
Picture of Tucan Founders
Wayra Germany invests in Tucan.ai meeting summary software jointly with Faraday Venture Partners, APX, and IBB Ventures. 7-figure financing round promotes digitalization with AI-based software.

September 20, 2021

Wayra Germany invests in Tucan.ai automated meeting summary software expansion


Munich, Germany, September 20, 2021 – Wayra Germany, Telefónica's Open Innovation Hub, announces today its investment in Tucan.ai, a meeting summary software from Berlin. With this move, telecommunications group Telefonica is further expanding its collaboration with the start-up to specifically promote digitalization through AI-based software. In addition to Wayra, Faraday Venture Partners, APX, and IBB Ventures as the lead investor are involved in the seven-figure financing round.

Increased productivity thanks to more efficient meetings

The team around Tucan.ai founders Lukas Rintelen, Florian Polak and Michael Schramm is developing AI software that automatically transcribes and summarizes video conferences and business meetings. This allows meetings to be recorded in the most popular meeting platforms such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams, as well as offline meetings. To do this, the software uses automated speech and content recognition to clearly summarize conversation content. All meetings are stored centrally and can be quickly retrieved via a search mask. In addition, Tucan.ai enables automated result protocols to be shared with all meeting participants with a click.

"Today's situation is ironic," says Florian Polak, Co-Founder and Managing Director. "Despite technological advances, we are increasingly wasting energy and productivity in more and more meetings." In traditional office jobs, an entire workday is spent on meetings each week on average. "For most companies, a four-day week would be easily possible, and without any loss of productivity," adds Lukas Rintelen.

Wayra Germany invests and offers access to Telefónica

In addition to the investment, Wayra Germany also offers Tucan.ai the opportunity to gain Telefónica Germany as a direct customer. This is based on the venture client model, through which Wayra Germany supports international start-ups that then work with Telefonica's various business units to integrate innovative technologies like Tucan.ai's directly into business processes.

"We are convinced of the potential of Tucain.ai, because handling communication processes in companies more efficiently is now more than ever a focus topic, and AI-based software is an important key to more productivity. Tucan.ai has the potential to revolutionize the meeting culture in companies with its software: With this, we can help shape the way we work tomorrow – more productivity with the same number of working hours per week," said Florian Bogenschütz, CEO of Wayra Germany.

IBB Ventures, Faraday Venture Partners and APX are further investors

In addition to Wayra Germany, the founding team was able to convince angel investors from Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well as VC IBB Ventures and the European investor network Faraday Venture Partners of their software and collect a seven-figure investment sum. Also participating in the investment round is Berlin-based VC and existing investor APX, the early-stage investor backed by Axel Springer and Porsche that has supported the start-up since 2019.  

"Software has completely transformed our working lives over the last 20 years. In the last year, the way we work together has changed fundamentally once again. Tucan.ai aims to rethink meetings in this environment by using software to enable automated collaborative workflows. We believe that Tucan.ai addresses a huge market potential and that there will be a growing demand for such solutions to manage meetings in a time-efficient way and to use valuable resources in a more value-adding way", says Robert Kusche, Investment Manager at IBB Ventures. 

Tucan.ai hits the nerve of the times

With its AI tool, Tucan.ai wants to help companies handle their communication processes more efficiently. After all, if you communicate in a targeted and purposeful manner in your professional environment, you can make management processes more productive and thus directly relieve the workload of your employees. Especially since during the Corona pandemic, the number of daily meetings increased by leaps and bounds due to increased remote work, Tucan.ai solves an acute problem of many companies with its software. The four-day week has also been around for some time as the working model of the future: with an efficient, lean meeting culture and simplified communication processes, it can become reality. 

"The lockdowns have led to further digitization of both our professional and personal communications. Tucan.ai addresses exactly this issue and thus hits the nerve of the time. We see great potential in automating collaborative workflows," said Anastasia Troyanov, Investment Manager at APX. 

"Faraday is committed to investing in founders who have a clear vision and a particular understanding of their market. Video conferencing has grown exponentially but our meetings still haven't become more efficient. We strongly believe that Tucan.ai has found a way to address these issues and will play an important role in defining the future of work," says Dennis Kirpensteijn, Managing Director for Faraday in Germany. 

About Tucan.ai
At Tucan we rethink the way we do meetings. We provide a software that automatically takes meeting notes for you, analyses and even summarises them. Our aim is to enable everyone to focus on what really matters to them in meetings. We take care of the rest. Tucan.ai was founded in 2019 by Florian Polak, Lukas Rintelen and Michael Schramm. More information on www.tucan.ai.

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About Wayra Germany

Wayra Germany is the Open Innovation Hub of telecommunications group Telefónica. As an early-stage investment arm, Wayra Germany scales technology-oriented start-ups. The focus is on the venture client model, which enables start-ups from the fields of Internet of Things, data analytics, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence to win Telefónica as customers for products and solutions - while offering unique access to the infrastructure of the global telecommunications company. Telefónica, in turn, benefits from the innovative ideas of the start-ups, on the one hand, to improve processes within the Telefónica Group and, on the other hand, to develop new products for Telefónica brands. Wayra Germany was recently named Germany's best digital lab of a corporate group by Infront Consulting and the business magazine Capital.
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