Meetings are essential to help teams, especially remote or hybrid teams, stay connected. But too many meetings can become unproductive, as shared information and action items get buried under all the other things employees need to do. Productivity Platform loopin wants to help by integrating with work apps and collecting information from multiple meetings, making it easy to find and share. The Washington state-based startup announced today that after eight months of working with 450 companies in the United States, it is coming out of stealth mode today.
The startup, backed by Venture Highway and angel investors, was founded in April 2021 by college friends Anurag Varma, Parth Pareek and Mehul Dudi. Before Loopin, Varma was a product lead at Venture Highway in Upgrad, Pareek was a product lead at Samsung and Dudi worked as an engineering manager at Freshworks.
The startup came about because the three realized their meeting hours had increased at the start of the pandemic, but found that the meetings became less productive. They struggled to keep track of decisions and updates made in various meetings and action items that needed to be done.
During a conversation, the founders went to a “rabbit house to discuss unproductive meetings and how our work is dispersed in the number of apps we use at work,” Varma said. “This eventually led us to think what if we had a super app that could pull information from all the apps and give us the context we needed at the right time – the things to discuss in meetings, pending tasks that require action, or follow-ups with other team members, which would greatly relieve cognitive overload and free up our bandwidth for low-leverage tasks.”
Loopin founders Parth Pareek, Anurag Varma and Mehul Dudi
Varma added that an organization uses more than 250 apps on average, with each team using about 40 to 60 apps, leading to information fragmentation. For example, the lifecycle of a meeting usually starts with a calendar invite that may have a calendar from another app. During meetings, team members use various note-taking apps to write down takeaways and next steps, then share them via email and Slack and create tasks in a project management app. This means that before the next meeting, each person has to refer to multiple apps to prepare and check the status of various tasks.
“Basically, the knowledge you’ve created is separate from the meeting,” Varma said. “Which leads to loss of context and unproductive, duplicate discussions.”
To solve these problems, Loopin integrates with Slack, Zoom, GMeet, Gmail, Notion, Asana, Trello, Jira and other work apps. The features include a meeting management component that captures and shares meeting results with participants.
Notes are organized by meetings and past discussions resurface in future meetings so that important tasks are not lost. Meanwhile, Loopin’s tasks feature helps each person keep track of their action items by adding tasks to their calendar. If employees are wondering how they spend their time, they can check out Loopin’s calendar analytics. This means that all participants are up to date for the next meeting, saving the whole team time.
As examples of what Loopin can do, Varma provided a few case studies. For example, a design firm uses Loopin to track customer calls and internally share next steps at the end of each meeting. The platform tags tasks to meetings so designers can easily access their context without having to be there for them all.
A startup accelerator mentor uses Loopin to document coaching sessions, which are usually ad hoc, so Loopin helps by linking back to past calls and bringing up past conversations and action items. Meanwhile, the marketing team at an ecommerce company uses Loopin to perform asynchronous updates, which meant they could eliminate their status update meetings.
Varma said Loopin’s target customer is founders, senior executives and managers in multi-functional roles who spend a lot of time in meetings, plus knowledge workers in general. The startup is currently pre-revenue. The early beta users will be free for the next six months, then Loopin will run on a freemium model from Q2 2023. The Loopin team is currently working on APIs so that the users can build their own integrations.