Three former Google X scientists goal to offer you a second mind nearly — not within the sci-fi or chip-in-your-head sense — however via an AI-powered app that positive factors context by listening to every part you say within the background. Their startup, TwinMind, has raised $5.7 million in seed funding and launched an Android model, together with a brand new AI speech mannequin. It additionally has an iPhone model.
Co-founded in March 2024 by Daniel George (CEO) and his former Google X colleagues Sunny Tang and Mahi Karim (each CTOs), TwinMind runs within the background, capturing ambient speech (with person permission) to construct a private information graph.
By turning spoken ideas, conferences, lectures and conversations into structured reminiscence, the app can generate AI-powered notes, to-dos, and solutions. It really works offline, processes audio in real-time to transcribe on-device, and might seize audio constantly for 16–17 hours with out draining the machine’s battery, the founders say. The app also can again up person information so conversations could be recovered if the machine is misplaced, although customers can opt-out of that. It additionally helps real-time translation in over 100 languages.
TwinMind differentiates itself from AI assembly note-takers like Otter, Granola, and Fireflies by capturing audio passively within the background all day. To make this potential, the staff constructed a low-level service in pure Swift that runs natively on the iPhone. In distinction, many opponents use React Native and depend on cloud-based processing, which Apple restricts from working within the background for prolonged intervals, George mentioned in an unique interview.
“We spent about six to seven months final yr simply perfecting this audio seize constantly and getting there to search out quite a lot of hacks round Apple’s walled backyard,” he instructed Trendster.
George left Google X in 2020 and obtained the concept for TwinMind in 2023 when was working at JPMorgan as Vice President and Utilized AI Lead, attending back-to-back conferences every day. To save lots of time, he constructed a script that captured audio, transcribed it on his iPad, and fed it into ChatGPT — which started to know his tasks and even generate usable code. Impressed by the outcomes, he shared it with pals and posted about it on Blind, the place others confirmed curiosity however didn’t need one thing working on their work laptops. That led him to construct an app that would run on a private cellphone, quietly listening throughout conferences to collect helpful context.
Along with the cellular app, TwinMind presents a Chrome extension that gathers further context via browser exercise. Utilizing imaginative and prescient AI, it could possibly visually scan open tabs and interpret content material from varied platforms, together with e mail, Slack, and Notion.
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The startup even used the extension itself to shortlist interns from over 850 functions they obtained this summer time.
“We opened all of the LinkedIn profiles and CVs of the 854 candidates in browser tabs, then requested the Chrome extension to rank the very best candidates,” George mentioned. “It did a improbable job — that’s how we employed our last 4 interns.”
He famous that present AI chatbots — together with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude — can not simply course of lots of of paperwork or parse sign-ups from instruments like LinkedIn or Gmail to collect contextual info. Equally, AI-powered browsers akin to these from Perplexity and The Browser Firm lack the flexibility to construct information out of your offline conversations and in-person conferences.
The startup presently has over 30,000 customers, with about 15,000 of them energetic every month. As a lot as 20–30% of TwinMind customers additionally use the Chrome extension, George mentioned.
Whereas the U.S. is the biggest base for TwinMind to date, the startup can be seeing traction from India, Brazil, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Europe.
TwinMind targets the overall viewers, though 50–60% of its customers are presently professionals, about 25% are college students, and the remaining 20–25% are people utilizing it for private functions.
George instructed Trendster that his father is among the many people utilizing TwinMind to write down their autobiography.
One in every of AI’s vital drawbacks is its potential to compromise person privateness. However George asserted that TwinMind doesn’t prepare its fashions on person information and is designed to work with out sending recordings to the cloud. In contrast to many different AI note-taking apps, TwinMind doesn’t let customers entry audio recordings later — the audio is deleted on the fly — whereas solely the transcribed textual content is saved domestically within the app, he famous.
Google X expertise helped velocity issues up
The TwinMind co-founders spent a couple of years engaged on varied tasks at Google X. George instructed Trendster that he labored on six tasks alone, together with iyO — the staff behind AI-powered earbuds, which not too long ago made headlines for suing OpenAI and Jony Ive. That have helped the TwinMind staff transfer shortly from idea to product.
“Google X was truly the proper place to organize for beginning your individual firm,” mentioned George. “There are round 30 to 40 startup-like tasks taking place at any given time. No person else will get to work at six early-stage startups over two or three years earlier than launching their very own — at the very least not in such a brief span.”
Earlier than becoming a member of Google, George labored on making use of deep studying to gravitational wave astrophysics as a part of the Nobel Prize–successful LIGO group on the College of Illinois’ Nationwide Heart for Supercomputing Functions. He had accomplished his PhD in AI for astrophysics in only one yr — on the age of 24 — a feat that led him to affix Stephen Wolfram’s analysis lab in 2017 as a deep studying and AI researcher.
That early reference to Wolfram got here full circle years later — he ended up writing the primary verify for TwinMind, marking his first-ever funding in a startup. The latest seed spherical was led by Streamlined Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital and different buyers, together with Wolfram. The spherical values TwinMind at $60 million post-money.
TwinMind Ear-3 mannequin
Along with its apps and browser extension, TwinMind has additionally launched the TwinMind Ear-3 mannequin, a successor to its current Ear-2, which helps over 140 languages worldwide and has a phrase error price of 5.26%, the startup mentioned. The brand new mannequin also can acknowledge totally different audio system in a dialog and has a speaker diarization error price of three.8%.
The brand new AI mannequin is a fine-tuned mix of a number of open-source fashions, educated on a curated set of human-annotated web information — together with podcasts, movies, and films.
“We discovered that the extra languages you help, the higher the mannequin will get at understanding accents and regional dialects as a result of it’s coaching on a broader vary of audio system,” George mentioned.
The mannequin prices $0.23/ hour and will probably be obtainable via an API to builders and enterprises over the following few weeks.
The Ear-3, not like the Ear-2, doesn’t help an entire offline expertise, as it’s bigger in dimension and runs on the cloud. Nonetheless, the app robotically switches to Ear-2 if the web goes away after which strikes again to Ear-3 when it’s again, George mentioned.
With the introduction of the Ear-3, TwinMind now presents a Professional subscription at $15/month, with a bigger context window of as much as 2 million tokens and e mail help inside 24 hours. Nonetheless, the free model nonetheless exists with all the present options together with limitless hours of transcriptions and on-device speech recognition.
The startup presently has a staff of 11 members. It plans to rent a couple of designers to reinforce its person expertise and arrange a enterprise growth staff to promote its API. Moreover, there are plans to spend some cash on buying new customers.
