Transcription Startup Notta Raises USD 6.3M to Bring Standalone Recorder to the US

Japanese AI transcription company Notta has raised USD 6.3m in a round that closed June 30, 2025. 

GL Ventures and Mizuho Leaguer Investments led the funding round, which brought Notta’s total investment to over USD 16m; newcomer GSR also participated.

“Our investors serve as strategic partners rather than operators. GL Ventures is a returning investor and has supported our early growth,” Notta CEO Ryan Zhang told Slator. “GSR and Mizuho are new partners who bring valuable insights, especially in enterprise scaling and Japan market expertise.”

Zhang declined to share specific figures but noted that “the post-money valuation reflects strong confidence from investors, driven by our significant APR growth over the past year and expanding global demand.”

The company has a unique dual-revenue model. Unlike competitors that focus on app- or browser-based agents, Notta offers a USD 149 Memo AI voice recorder, which helps direct customers into its higher-margin SaaS subscriptions. According to Zhang, this strategy generates immediate revenue while also reducing client acquisition costs. 

Customers press a button on the device to start recording, and the content syncs with the SaaS platform, offering transcription, AI summaries, and other services. 

“This creates a low-friction entry point and a high-retention subscription funnel — similar to how hardware can be a powerful gateway into digital ecosystems,” Zhang explained, adding that he believes this is part of what attracted investors to Notta. 

Another point was Notta’s AI agent roadmap, which lays out plans to build specialized AI agents for verticals such as sales, consulting, and research, “going beyond transcription to generate actionable insights.”

Notta currently supports 58 languages and works for both live speech and pre-recorded audio. The company states that it has more than 8 million users, more than 100,000 clients, and has handled more than 300 million hours of content.

Expand and Conquer

Write-ups about the funding round indicate that the money will be used to support “aggressive US market expansion,” in the form of sales, marketing operations, and enhanced platform infrastructure to support a greater number of US users, specifically enterprise customers. 

Additionally, Zhang told Slator, Notta plans to prioritize several other areas, including vertical-specific AI agent R&D; improvements to the hardware ecosystem and the launch of new AI-powered recording hardware; and team expansion, particularly in product, sales, and AI engineering, both in the US and in Japan.

“The US is the next natural step because it’s the world’s largest SaaS and AI productivity tools market […] The AI note-taking and meeting assistant space is still emerging, giving us a chance to innovate early.” — Ryan Zhang, CEO, Notta

The company’s US strategy seeks to position Notta Memo as a standalone device for professionals such as sales reps, consultants, and content creators. Memo, in turn, will be used as an “intuitive first-touch experience” that onboards users into the SaaS. 

Notta has also hinted at the launch of a “major new AI product in the second half of the year,” without sharing more details. 

“The US is the next natural step because it’s the world’s largest SaaS and AI productivity tools market,” Zhang explained. “The AI note-taking and meeting assistant space is still emerging, giving us a chance to innovate early.”