The Story of Val: Building the Future of AI-Powered Meetings

The Story of Val: Building the Future of AI-Powered Meetings

Sometimes the best innovations come from unexpected places. For Val CEO Andy Berman, the journey to revolutionizing virtual meetings began with tracking babies’ sleep patterns.

From Baby Monitors to Business Meetings

At Nanit, where Andy served as Chief Operating Officer, the team had mastered the art of extracting meaningful insights from video feeds. “At Nanit, we very much focus on providing parents with analytics from video. So we track sleep, movement, breathing. We do it all from a video feed. We use computer vision and machine learning,” Andy explains.

But running a distributed team at Nanit revealed a persistent problem: existing meeting tools weren’t built for how modern teams actually work. “We ran Distributed, we had a lot of people in a lot of different locations, and were always constantly searching for a conference room, catching people up just to move work forward,” Andy recalls.

The team tried every available solution but found them lacking. “We tried the modern video conferencing tools, whether it was Skype or Zoom or webex, and we just couldn’t find a platform that actually helped us work the way we worked.”

The Birth of Val

This frustration led Andy to leave his role at Nanit at the end of 2018 to start Val in early 2019. The transition felt natural to him: “I thrive in uncertainty, and so I love the early stages, the building, the throwing ideas against a wall. So it was a great time for me.”

The vision was clear: create a meeting platform that didn’t just enable communication, but actually helped teams collaborate and preserve knowledge. As Andy explains, “Most of the time you’re in a meeting, you have video open on one side, you have a document open on the other side. You’re copiously taking notes. And I just thought, there has to be a better tool out there that’s much more focused on collaboration.”

Building the Product

Val’s development focused on three key moments in the meeting lifecycle. “Before the meeting, everyone contributes to a shared agenda. During the meeting, everyone stays engaged and energized with a suite of collaboration features. And after the meeting, that’s the real magic,” Andy shares.

The “magic” he refers to is Val’s ability to transform meetings into actionable intelligence. “Instead of this repository of meetings, we give you instant searchable, shareable content, and you can share with anyone who needs to know. You also get an instant TLDR of what happened in the meeting about 7 seconds later.”

Breaking Through in a Crowded Market

In a space dominated by established players, Val differentiated itself through accuracy and speed. “A lot of people actually talk about AI. They talk about a summary, they talk about instant notes from the meeting. But from what I’ve seen in terms of the products out there on the market, no one actually does it accurately,” Andy notes.

This focus on accuracy has resonated with users. “Our user base has, I think, tripled over the last 40 days,” Andy shares. Users have even compared the experience to time travel, as “you could log into after being out on vacation for a week and read the TLDRs from six or seven meetings and know exactly what happened.”

The Future of Meeting Intelligence

Looking ahead, Andy sees Val evolving beyond just meeting summaries. “I think three to five years from now we’re pushing the information to you. So any given moment at any given time will tell you what’s relevant and give you in the moment the knowledge you need, whether it’s in the meeting or after the meeting, to be a superhuman.”

This vision of proactive meeting intelligence represents what Andy believes is the next frontier in workplace collaboration. “We’re digitizing one of the last spaces that’s not digital today and that’s meetings,” he explains.

For the millions of knowledge workers spending their days in virtual meetings, Val’s story represents more than just another software tool – it’s about fundamentally reimagining how teams collaborate and preserve knowledge in the digital age.