A startup that records meetings and takes notes with artificial intelligence has just been bought by another company doing the same thing for email. The buyer is Superhuman, the bought is Fathom - a tool founded in 2020, put through Y Combinator, which raised over 30 million dollars and was valued at 94 million dollars in 2024.

Those are not the numbers worth paying attention to. Fathom has over 400,000 monthly active users, and more than a million people have recorded a meeting through its platform at least once. That is a product already living inside somebody's working day - and that is what is being paid for, not the code.

Richard White, Fathom's chief, stated the motive without decoration: "Superhuman's reach is enormous. I have always thought about acquisitions in terms of how quickly you build a product everyone uses, and part of that depends on distribution. If we ran Fathom as a standalone company, we would have had to build a lot of things that already exist in Superhuman's platform."

Translated: we did not sell technology, we sold time. Instead of three years building everything they lack, they move into somebody else's house that is already furnished.

Shishir Mehrotra, Superhuman's chief, reveals the other half of the arithmetic - his company had already been working on the same feature internally. "We had been working in this area internally for some time. I think that greatly increased our conviction about demand in this category", he says, adding that it became clear how deep the products in it are: "A lot of these products make the job look easy, but it is actually quite tricky to do well in all its parts."

In other words: we tried, we saw how hard it is, and we bought somebody who had already solved it. That is a more honest description of a large share of today's technology acquisitions than companies usually allow themselves.

Fathom's investors included Zoom's apps fund and Steve Huffman, the chief of Reddit. When the platform you record meetings on invests in the tool that processes those meetings, the circle closes on its own - and the exit at the end is a purchase by a third party.

The question that remains for anyone using one of these tools is more down to earth than the valuations. Meeting recordings and their transcripts now change owner along with the company. None of the users voted for that, and hardly anybody reads the terms of service twice. How many such relocations will your work conversations go through while the tool makes its way across the market?