Fathom adds bot-free video, audio and transcript modes to challenge Granola

Fathom is moving the fight over meeting assistants from accuracy alone to trust. The company is adding bot-free capture alongside transcript-only, audio-only and full video plus screen-capture modes, a shift meant to answer a workplace complaint that has grown louder as more meetings fill up with visible recording bots. Fathom says its bot-free option also preserves speaker attribution, respects the mute button and is designed to fit into shared team workflows rather than stay locked to one user’s notes.

That puts Fathom squarely up against Granola, which has built its brand around invisible capture. Granola says it transcribes a computer’s audio directly with no meeting bots joining the call, a pitch aimed at the same privacy and disruption concerns Fathom is now trying to meet head-on. Granola also narrowed the competitive gap further with a March 25 Series C that raised $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures with participation from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins and backing from Lightspeed, Spark and NFDG.

Fathom is trying to answer that pressure with more than a new recording mode. Its Q1 2026 update says Ask Fathom became available across the account, and the company says action items can automatically sync into Asana projects. Fathom also says its API is publicly available to users and partners, a sign that the product is being sold less as a note-taker and more as an internal workflow layer for teams that want meeting data to move into other systems without manual cleanup.

The broader strategy reflects a deeper shift in the market. Fathom raised $17 million in Series A funding in September 2024, and Business Wire said at the time that the company planned to further develop Team Edition so managers could gain visibility into customer conversations and coach their teams. That ambition now reads as a direct challenge to Granola’s enterprise push, which includes customers such as Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack and Asana. The next phase of AI meeting tools is being sold on invisibility, control and the right to decide who, or what, is in the room.