Vowel

» see vowel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Vowel was founded in New York in 2018 by Andrew Berman, Ben Kempe, Matthew Slotkin and Paul Fisher, and it was built on an observation that sounds obvious now and did not then: the meeting is a document. Everything said in it is content, and the recording is useless unless you can search it. So Vowel ran the call, transcribed it live, kept the agenda and the notes beside the video, and then let you search across every meeting the company had ever held. Afterward it generated summaries and pulled out action items, which is the part that arrived early enough to look like magic in 2022.

It raised $13.5 million in a Series A led by Lobby Capital, taking the total to $17.8 million, and came out of a beta with a ten thousand person waitlist behind it. The homepage carried a Forbes line claiming even the most loyal Zoom user would swoon over what Vowel did natively, and a claim of its own that thousands of teams were using it. People who switched to it from Zoom said so in public, repeatedly, and the thing they named as the reason was always the search, never the video.

On the evening of Thursday 29 June 2023, at 22:57 UTC, Berman posted that it was over. The farewell email said it plainly: "With a heavy heart, I write to let you know that this is the last week for Vowel. You will have until July 5, 2023, to download your recordings." The cause given was that Vowel had signed a term sheet with a venture firm and the firm had then decided not to proceed, leaving nothing in the account and no time to go back out.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

Nobody on Hacker News believed the story as told. The thread filled with people pointing out the shape of the claim: a company describing growth, traction and loyal customers, and in the same breath saying one investor's change of mind had killed it overnight. The obvious question was why the rest of the cap table and the rest of the market would not step in for a business doing that well. One customer wrote that they had dropped Zoom entirely for Vowel, loved it, and still did not think this was the whole story.

The quiet version is that a company living on a signed term sheet it has not yet banked is a company that has already run out, and 2023 was the year that stopped being survivable. The AI meeting category was also about to be flattened. Within eighteen months the summary and the action list were a checkbox inside Zoom and Microsoft Teams, included at no extra cost, and the standalone product that did them well had nothing left to sell.

~ two dates, one company ~

Vowel ended twice, according to Vowel. The farewell email said the last week was the first week of July 2023. But the marketing site simply stayed up afterward, unchanged, still inviting visitors to try Vowel for free, through captures in July, September, October and all the way to 16 December 2023. No banner, no notice, no sign that anything had happened.

Then, sometime between 16 December 2023 and 3 February 2024, a line appeared across the top: "We stopped supporting the Vowel service as of December 15, 2023. Stay tuned for what's next in 2024!" Same company, two statements, five and a half months apart, both first-person. The farewell email is the one written to customers with a deadline attached, so it is the one this grave dates the death to. The December line reads like the sentence a company writes when it is about to be acquired and needs the record tidy.

~ the next chapter ~

On 6 March 2024 Zapier announced it had acquired Vowel. The whole team went across, the technology went into Zapier Central, and Berman became Director of AI there. That is a soft landing for the people and a complete loss for the customers, who had already spent nine months somewhere else and had been given a week to get their own recordings out.

There is no vowel.com anymore. Not a parked page, not a redirect to the acquirer's product note, just NXDOMAIN on both schemes, which for a company with a Series A and a Forbes pull-quote is unusually complete. The distance from where I sit is procurement. In an Ankara engineering organization the meeting tool is a line item signed with Microsoft years ago by somebody in a different building, and no team gets to replace it with a five-year-old company in New York on the strength of better transcripts.

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