Desktop AI assistant app Highlight spins out of Medal with $10M in funding

Earlier this year, Medal, a startup known for its video game clipping features, launched a cross-platform AI assistant called Highlight. Now, the company is spinning off Highlight into a new entity, which has raised $10 million in a funding round.

General Catalyst led the funding round with Valor, SV Angel, and Conviction Embed participating in the round. Medal also put in $3 million in the new entity out of $13 million it raised in July.

Medal’s co-founder, Pim de Witte, is the only common link between Medal and Highlight now, as the latter has its own team, including Haris Butt, who was VP of Design at productivity company ClickUp, Medal co-founder Josh Lipson, and Medal’s first head of growth Mark Bond.

“We started Highlight as a research project within Medal. We wanted to explore the translation layer between LLMs (Large Language Models) and what’s going on your screen. But we realized to grow quickly and hire engineers for a specific app by offering them equity, Highlight needs to be a separate entity,” de Witte told TechCrunch over a call.

Highlight is a cross-platform desktop app that lets you attach your screen, a voice note, or a document as context and then ask questions to an LLM. The app can also transcribe your calls from system audio, so you can ask questions about a particular meeting later.

You can perform actions that have become pretty common with AI assistants, such as summarizing, rewriting, highlighting, and explaining the context attached to the app at the time of querying.

In July, the company had opened up its platform for developers to build apps on top of Highlight. However, the startup realized that this approach would limit custom actions to a handful of developers. With the latest version, the company will allow users to prompt their way to a custom action like summarizing the first 10 minutes of a meeting. Highlight also wants to open up prompts to the community of users, helping one person discover a useful automation someone has created.

For developers with programming knowledge, the company plans to open up an agentic framework that will allow them to use parts of your system and do small tasks — such as summarizing documents in a particular folder — in the background.

“Our idea is to create virtual employees so you can start delegating some of your tasks to them and have more time on your hands,” de Witte said.

Image Credits: Highlight

With today’s announcement, the company is releasing a push-to-talk shortcut and new conversations app that records your meetings.

Niko Bonatsos, venture partner at General Catalyst, told TechCrunch over email that Highlight is easy to understand for users because of the on-screen context and the lack of complex prompts.

“I’ve been underwhelmed by the fact that most consumer-facing AI companies only let you interact with them via chat interfaces… This demonstrates a lack of imagination and frankly limits what is possible with this powerful new technology. We are very encouraged with the bold design choices that Pim and his team have made so far,” Bonatsos said, pointing out that Highlight’s combination of automation and on-screen context allows users to utilize AI better.

Highlight AI is free to use for now, but the company wants to adopt a pricing plan based on the word count processed by the assistant down the line.