Last week, Fellow employees gathered at their annual company summit to share drinks and revel in their latest milestone, only to be surprised by 200 drones displaying their logo above the heart of Ottawa.
The enterprise meeting assistant startup had gone all out to celebrate hitting 5,000 customers, gathering its employees to witness the drone show above Lansdowne Park before sharing drinks on a rooftop bar 17 storeys above the Byward Market. Fellow’s grand gestures match its ambitions to parlay recent customer growth into becoming Ottawa’s next centaur, joining the likes of Assent and Fullscript.
“We lost a lot of customers during that transition.”
Aydin Mirzaee, Fellow
Fellow’s customer milestone has been a long time in the making, CEO Aydin Mirzaee recounted at AccelerateOTT last week. Founded in 2017 as a meeting productivity tool, Fellow had raised nearly $30 million in venture funding when the rise of AI models like ChatGPT in 2023 made it clear the company had to do a hard reboot.
“We lost a lot of customers during that transition,” Mirzaee said in a panel discussion. “We changed the way we talked about ourselves, we had to reorg the whole company, all of our metrics changed, the onboarding changed … how do you not lose that much revenue while you reinvent?”
Fellow’s direction went from meeting templates and agendas to an AI assistant that sits in on company meetings and takes notes, capturing internal discussion while balancing controls for security and sensitive conversations. While Fellow had to take an early hit to customer count in the pivot, Mirzaee told BetaKit in an interview at the event that his company is growing faster than ever.
“We launched our AI product in January 2024; [it] was not a very good January 2024,” Mirzaee said. But, he added, Fellow’s AI revenue went from zero to $10 million within two years, and its rate of customer growth has jumped by a factor of 2.5 between January and May. Recently, Fellow signed on HubSpot, which onboarded its 9,000 employees to the platform.
Mirzaee credits his company’s growth to strong word of mouth as businesses try to become AI-native.
“We’re doing all the traditional things that you would do to market and sell, but the type of growth that we’re seeing right now … we wouldn’t have seen stuff like this if it was not for word of mouth,” Mirzaee said.
While he discussed the headache of Fellow’s ballooning AI costs on stage, Mirzaee told BetaKit that the company doesn’t lose money by adding customers thanks to being a premium solution for enterprise: “people pay more, but we also offer the best,” he said.
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Mirzaee did not disclose Fellow’s current revenue beyond saying it is in the “double digit millions,” but laid out his vision of achieving $100 million in revenue by 2028. He plans to do that by improving Fellow’s judgement for what should be captured as an on-the-record and off-the-record conversation.
“If you had a super smart lawyer, accountant, and MBA rolled up into one, and they were responsible for listening [in] on every conversation in your company, and had to be smart about what goes into your corporate brain and what doesn’t—Fellow is that person,” Mirzaee said.
All images courtesy Fellow.