November 24, 2025 — When AI note-taking tool Fireflies announced its Series C funding and a valuation exceeding $1 billion today, co-founder and CTO Krish Ramineni revealed on X an embarrassing startup history: "In 2016, we didn't have any AI at all. All meeting summaries were manually typed by me and my partner." This "human pretending to be AI" past quickly sparked a fire in the Silicon Valley community, pushing Fireflies into the spotlight.
Pizza Dinner and the Birth of "Fred"
- In 2016, after six failed startups, the two relied on pizza to survive and decided to "pretend to have AI" to get work.
- They registered a virtual assistant called "Fred," infiltrating customer Zoom meetings under a human identity, delivering summaries within 10 minutes, and signing off as "Fred" before sending them.
- Early customers thought Fred was an algorithm, but in reality, it was just two keyboards and Google Docs.
From Human to Cloud: True Automation in 2017
- After securing their first seed orders, the team used the revenue to hire voice engineers, switching to ASR + NLP pipeline in 2017.
- In 2020, they launched their native AI engine, and in 2022, introduced GPT summaries, achieving full automation.
- Today, Fireflies supports over 50 languages, serving more than 500,000 organizations globally, with over 35% being Fortune 500 companies.
Privacy Controversy and Official Response
- Netizens questioned whether "unauthorized human listening" violated privacy.
- Ramineni explained that early customers were aware and signed additional agreements; they completely stopped using the human mode after 2017.
- The company now offers SOC-2 compliance and end-to-end encryption, allowing users to choose regional storage for meeting data.
Industry Insight: Validate Demand First, Then Build Technology
- Venture capital experts commented that Fireflies used a "no-code" approach to validate product-market fit, giving time and data for subsequent AI transformation.
- Competitors such as Otter.ai and Grain also admitted that they had manual annotation or transcription stages in their early days, with "human plus AI" being an industry secret.
Next Step: Voice OS and Workflow Automation
- Fireflies is testing a workflow where "voice commands → automatic CRM updates → send follow-up emails," aiming to upgrade from a meeting assistant to a "voice-native operating system."
- The company expects ARR to exceed $100 million by 2026 and will open APIs for third-party hardware and in-car scenarios.
"First pretend to have AI, then truly become AI" — Fireflies' success story provides a "gray-scale validation" example for countless resource-limited startups, reminding the market: behind the technology glamour often lies a survival history of manual operations.
