EXEC SUMMARY:
CHALLENGE:
To securely integrate communication data from video calls, Affinity needed an easy-to-implement solution that could analyze transcripts from all major meeting platforms without having to manually record the calls.
SOLUTION:
Rather than tie up their developers on building and maintaining homegrown recording bots, Affinity chose Recall.ai to provide meeting analysis across all the major video meeting apps.
RESULTS:
Affinity saved three months of developer work and now has seamless access to the meeting data they need to power their relationship intelligence solutions.
Affinity streamlines transcript analysis and saves three months of dev time with Recall.ai
A world where anyone can cultivate and fully harness their network to succeed. That’s the relationship-driven vision of Affinity, a full stack company that helps private capital investors find, manage, and close more deals through relationship intelligence, automation, and data enlightenment. To accomplish this, Affinity built Affinity Notetaker, an advanced, high-throughput platform for syncing and understanding data from all kinds of communication streams.
“Affinity focuses a lot on automation,” said Product Manager Kunal Bhat. “We automatically sync emails and meetings from our users’ calendars and inboxes. Zoom automatically provides ways to access transcripts as well, but we ran into some limitations.”
Challenge: Analyze video meeting data without manual recording
Affinity needed recordings or transcripts from video calls on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet for their CRM to automatically analyze key points and relationship details. However, these transcripts were only accessible if calls were manually recorded and shared with Affinity’s platform.
“We would have to access their Zoom recordings after the fact, which meant that if our customers weren't the one who had recording permissions, we would never have access to those calls at all,” Bhat said.
This threatened to introduce a major blind spot in Affinity's relationship intelligence. If they couldn’t analyze meeting communications seamlessly, their platform might miss crucial details that would hinder Affinity’s customers from finding and closing business deals.
“We'd done some assessment of what it'd take to build a bot in-house. We knew it would be expensive. We expected that it’d take multiple developers across a quarter to figure out how to spin up a different machine for every bot and manage that lifecycle as well,” Bhat said. We knew it would be an ongoing effort to maintain it.”
The choice ahead was clear: Commit multiple developers to three months of initial work building transcript bots with ongoing upkeep and maintenance afterward, or find an outside solution. When they encountered Recall.ai, the choice was clear.
Solution: Integrate a seamless, cross-platform meeting recorder
“Affinity found Recall.ai when troubleshooting Zoom recordings and looking for an answer in the Zoom Dev Forums,” said Recall COO Amanda Zhu. “After our first conversation, it was clear we could solve their challenges while enabling them to focus on their core mission of empowering dealmakers.”
When Affinity learned they could integrate Recall.ai’s unified API into all their meeting platforms with only a few lines of code, they were immediately interested.
“We did an initial evaluation of integrating with Recall.ai from an engineering perspective. We were very clear that the solution makes considerable sense,” Bhat said.
Free up developers
First, Recall.ai would provide the recording and transcribing Affinity needed across their video meeting apps in a simple integration that would not tie down their developers for months.
“It wasn't even a very heavy discussion on Build versus Buy,” Bhat said. “We were very clear on what value proposition we want to focus on, and it's not bot management.”
“Affinity is streamlining relationship management with AI, helping dealmakers make smarter, faster decisions. At Recall.ai, we’re thrilled to support their vision by simplifying how they access and analyze meeting data. Our API enables teams like Affinity to focus on delivering unparalleled value to their customers,” said Zhu.
Cross-platform integration
Second, Recall.ai enabled Affinity to easily record and transcribe their private meetings on any platform their customers preferred.
“When we realized that Recall.ai allows us to provide support for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet at the same time, that addressed the risks or concerns in my head,” Bhat said.
Responsive support
Finally, Recall.ai’s team has provided rapid support for any onboarding or usability questions, empowering Affinity’s developers and users to pursue high-value business goals instead of navigating tweaks to code.
“Recall.ai has been very prompt in responding to our Slack queries all the time. So our experience working with Recall.ai has been very positive,” Bhat said.
“From day one, we’ve committed to making sure Affinity’s experience with Recall.ai is seamless. Our team is always here to help. Seeing Affinity leverage our API to power Affinity Notetaker has been incredibly rewarding,” said Zhu.
Results: A seamless experience for closing better deals
Now that Recall.ai is providing video platform-agnostic transcriptions, Affinity has the right technology to power their Affinity Notetaker platform and free their customers from CRM data drudgery.
“Affinity Notetaker automatically joins our customer’s meetings, transcribes their calls, and generates summarized meeting notes which are logged in the Affinity CRM,” said Bhat. “The tool uses our extensive understanding of private capital firms and roles to generate concise, error-free summaries that zero in on what matters most to our customers.”
By using its unified API to simplify how Affinity gathered relationship intelligence, Recall.ai saved Affinity three months of developer work and helped them do work that actually matters through AI applications.
“Private capital continues to move towards data-driven practices in pursuit of greater efficiency and productivity, and there’s a great opportunity for us at Affinity to facilitate that with the use of AI,” said Baht. “The more data that dealmakers centralize in Affinity using automation, the more opportunity there is in using AI to analyze it. Features like Affinity Notetaker increase the breadth of deal data captured in Affinity.”
“Affinity is shaping the future of AI-powered relationship management, and we’re honored to play a role in that journey,” Zhu said. “By making meeting data integration effortless, Recall.ai helps forward-thinking teams like Affinity focus on driving innovation and shaping the future of their industry.”
