Who owns Otter.ai? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Otter.ai is one of the most widely used AI note-taking tools, yet its ownership is far less visible than its product. The app transcribes meetings, generates summaries, and now sends AI agents to join calls on a user's behalf. By the end of 2025 the company reported more than 35 million users and over 1 billion meetings transcribed. It crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue the same year.

Behind that scale sits a small, private company. Otter.ai is the trading name of AISense Inc., a startup founded in Silicon Valley in 2016. It has never gone public, has no corporate parent, and has raised comparatively little venture money for its user base. That combination of wide reach and tight private ownership is what makes the question of control worth unpacking.

Ownership also matters here for a reason most note-taking apps never face. Like other AI productivity companies such as Grammarly, Otter built a huge free user base before turning it into recurring revenue. But unlike most peers, Otter is the named defendant in a consolidated class-action privacy case over how its bots record and use conversations. Who owns the company, and who decides how it handles recorded audio, is now a live legal question as much as a corporate one.

Otter.ai was founded in 2016 in Mountain View, California, and is now headquartered in Los Altos, California. The founders are Sam Liang and Yun Fu. Liang previously worked as an engineer at Google, where he contributed to the location technology behind Google Maps, and later held roles in the mobile and networking industry. The company was originally incorporated as AISense Inc., and it still uses that legal name.

The core product is an AI speech-to-text service. Otter records and transcribes meetings in real time, identifies speakers, and produces searchable notes and summaries. It integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and its automated bot can join scheduled calls to capture audio and generate a transcript without a person operating it.

The business sells on a freemium model. A free tier offers a capped number of transcription minutes per month, and paid Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans unlock longer recordings, team features, and administrative controls. In March 2025 the company reported passing $100 million in annual recurring revenue, with more than 35 million users by year-end. Otter has said it reached that scale with fewer than 200 employees.

Otter.ai is a private company. Its shares do not trade on any public exchange, and it has not filed for an initial public offering. Ownership is split among the founders, employees holding equity, and the venture capital firms that backed its four funding rounds. There is no parent company and no controlling corporate owner. Control rests with the founders and the investor syndicate assembled since 2016.

Otter does not publicly disclose its capitalization table, so the exact founder stakes are not confirmed. What is known is that Sam Liang, as chief executive officer and co-founder, is understood to be the largest individual shareholder. Co-founder Yun Fu also holds founder equity. Private companies at Otter's funding stage typically leave founders with a meaningful combined stake, but the specific percentages are not part of the public record and should not be assumed.

Otter has raised four disclosed rounds since 2016. The Series B in 2021 was by far the largest and remains its most recent priced round.

Total reported funding sits at roughly $73 million, though figures vary by source between about $63 million and $73 million because the 2021 round included a $10 million convertible note. The Series B alone accounted for $50 million of that total, which means the majority of Otter's outside capital arrived in a single 2021 round.

Spectrum Equity led the 2021 Series B and is the largest institutional backer. The growth-equity firm typically takes a board seat and a significant minority position in the companies it leads, which points to meaningful influence over Otter's later-stage direction.

Horizons Ventures, the private investment firm associated with Hong Kong businessman Li Ka-shing, led the 2017 Series A and has backed a range of technology companies. Draper Associates, the firm founded by venture investor Tim Draper, and its affiliated Draper Dragon fund seeded the company in 2016.

The 2020 venture round widened the investor base. It was led by NTT Docomo Ventures, the corporate venture arm of the Japanese telecom group, and included Fusion Fund, GGV, Slow Ventures, Harris Barton Asset Management, and Duke University's investment office. The presence of a strategic corporate investor and a university endowment alongside traditional venture firms is typical of a mid-stage startup broadening its cap table before a larger growth round. Larger foundation-model companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI have raised orders of magnitude more, but Otter has stayed deliberately lean.

Sam Liang is the chief executive officer and the central figure in Otter's ownership and management. He co-founded the company, sets its product strategy, and is its public voice on the pivot toward AI meeting agents. As co-founder and CEO he is understood to hold the largest individual equity position.

Yun Fu co-founded the company alongside Liang. Fu's day-to-day role has been less publicly documented than Liang's, and Otter does not publish a detailed current executive roster, so his present involvement is not fully confirmed.

Board composition is not publicly disclosed in full. Based on standard venture practice, the board would include Liang, one or more representatives of lead investor Spectrum Equity, and likely a seat tied to an earlier lead such as Horizons Ventures. Otter has not confirmed the exact members, so this reflects the typical structure for a company at its stage rather than a verified list.

Otter's most significant legal exposure is a consolidated class-action lawsuit over how its recording bot captures conversations. Four putative class suits were filed between August and September 2025 and combined in October 2025 into In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation before the federal court for the Northern District of California. The core allegation is that Otter's automated notetaker records meetings without obtaining consent from every participant, and that the company then used captured audio to help train its speech-recognition models.

The complaint asserts claims under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, California's Invasion of Privacy Act, Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and several state common-law theories. A notable feature of the case is that the named plaintiffs say they were not Otter customers at all. They were people on the other end of calls that someone else had brought the Otter bot into. Judge Eumi K. Lee held a motion-to-dismiss hearing on May 20, 2026, and the case remains ongoing. The outcome carries implications for the wider AI note-taking industry, not just Otter.

The lawsuit sits on top of a broader compliance problem for automated notetakers. Several states, including California and Illinois, require all parties to a private conversation to consent before it is recorded. A bot that auto-joins a calendar invite and begins capturing audio can put the user who invited it, and Otter itself, in a difficult position when other attendees never agreed to be recorded. Otter's Meeting Agent joins calls as a visible participant, which the company points to as a form of notice, but whether visible presence equals legal consent is one of the questions the litigation tests.

A separate strand of concern is what happens to captured audio and transcripts after a meeting. The privacy complaint alleges Otter used recorded conversations to improve its models. How a private company handles that data is set by its own leadership and investors rather than by any external regulator specific to the sector, which is part of why the ownership question and the data question are linked. Enterprise buyers increasingly demand contractual limits on model training, and the way companies like OpenAI monetize the data they collect has made these terms a standard part of procurement. Otter's handling of these commitments is now under scrutiny, and a formal risk register is exactly the kind of tool enterprise buyers use to track this exposure.

Otter's private, founder-led structure gives Sam Liang unusual latitude to steer the company through a sharp strategic shift. In 2025 Otter moved from passive transcription to active AI agents that join meetings, coach sales reps, and even run product demos on their own. That kind of pivot is easier to execute without the quarterly scrutiny a public company faces. The trade-off is that outside accountability runs through a small board and a handful of investors rather than public markets.

The concentration of later-stage capital in the 2021 Series B means Spectrum Equity is the investor with the most weight in the room. Because Otter has not raised a fresh priced round since, the company has avoided resetting its valuation during a period when many AI startups repriced sharply in either direction. That independence is a strength for control but a constraint on capital. Reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue on roughly $73 million of total funding is a lean outcome, and it reduces the pressure to raise on unfavorable terms.

For users and enterprise customers, ownership matters most through the privacy litigation. Decisions about how the recording bot behaves, what disclosures it makes, and whether recorded audio trains Otter's models are made by the founders and board, not by a regulator or a parent company with its own compliance regime. The consolidated class action will test whether that self-governed approach holds up under existing wiretapping and biometric-privacy law.

Finally, the absence of a recent priced round leaves Otter's valuation an open question. Investors, acquirers, and employees holding equity are all working from a 2021 reference point that predates the company's revenue milestone and its AI-agent product line. Any future round, secondary sale, or acquisition would reset that number, and the privacy case is one of the factors that would shape it. Anyone trying to estimate what the company is worth today has to work backward from revenue and comparables, the same approach a business valuation calculator applies to a private firm with no quoted price.

Sam Liang is the chief executive officer of Otter.ai. He co-founded the company in 2016 and previously worked as an engineer at Google, where he contributed to the location technology behind Google Maps. He is understood to be the company's largest individual shareholder.

No. Otter.ai is a private company operating under the legal name AISense Inc. Its shares are held by the founders, employees, and venture investors, and it has not filed for an initial public offering.

Otter.ai was founded in 2016 by Sam Liang and Yun Fu. It was originally incorporated as AISense Inc. and later became known publicly by its product name, Otter.ai.

The largest institutional shareholder is Spectrum Equity, which led the $50 million Series B in 2021. Other significant investors include Horizons Ventures, Draper Associates, GGV, Fusion Fund, and Slow Ventures. Among individuals, co-founder and CEO Sam Liang is understood to hold the largest stake, though Otter does not publish its capitalization table.

Otter has raised roughly $73 million reported across four rounds since 2016, with figures varying between about $63 million and $73 million depending on the source. The company has not disclosed a valuation. Its last priced round was the 2021 Series B, and it has not raised a fresh priced round since, so no current valuation is public.

No. Otter.ai is independent and has no parent company. It is controlled by its founders and the venture capital firms that funded its four rounds.