Sam Liang spent four years at Google leading the Maps Location Platform — he built the "blue dot" feature showing your location. In 2010, he founded Alohar Mobile, a context-aware mobile platform that was acquired by Alibaba in 2013. But Sam's real pain point was meetings — he had 30-40 meetings per week and couldn't remember everything discussed.

Building Proprietary AI

In early 2016, he partnered with CTO Yun Fu to launch AISense (later rebranded to Otter.ai). Rather than using third-party speech APIs, they built their own proprietary speech recognition engine from scratch, achieving superior accuracy in identifying speakers and transcribing overlapping speech.

The Zoom Partnership

Their breakthrough distribution move came in 2017 when Sam pitched a prototype to Zoom CEO Eric Yuan. Otter's real-time accuracy won Yuan over, and from 2017 to 2020, Otter was embedded directly into Zoom, unlocking a powerful enterprise distribution channel.

The Journalist Strategy

Meanwhile, they offered 600 free minutes of transcription when competitors charged $1/minute. They deliberately targeted journalists who became early evangelists — reporters paying $100/hour for transcription services discovered Otter and started writing about it, driving massive awareness with virtually zero marketing spend.

Pandemic Acceleration

The shift to remote meetings supercharged growth. By February 2021, they'd raised $50M in a Series B. In March 2025, Otter crossed $100M ARR with over 35 million global users and fewer than 200 employees — generating over $500,000 revenue per employee.

• Founded: 2016
• Zoom partnership: 2017-2020
• Series B: $50M (February 2021)
• $100M ARR: March 2025
• Users: 35M+
• Team: <200 employees
• Revenue per employee: $500K+