We build the handoff that meetings miss.
Founded in San Francisco in 2023. Bootstrapped. Three people who got tired of watching standup decisions evaporate by the time anyone opened their project tool.
The founding insight
Between 2019 and 2022, Ethan Goldberg led product at two distributed teams — a logistics software startup and a fintech product org, each split across three time zones. Both teams ran daily standups. Both used transcript tools. Neither had a reliable way to answer "who said they'd do what, and by when?" at the end of a Friday sprint check-in.
The problem wasn't the transcript. Transcripts were long, full, accurate. The problem was that nothing in the transcript knew it was an action item. "Someone should follow up on that" sat in the same blob of text as "good morning." Accountability required a human to re-read the whole thing and do the extraction manually — and that human was usually busy.
In late 2022, Ethan started building a prototype with Maya Chen — who had spent the previous four years on NLP infrastructure at a voice-analytics company — to see if the extraction step could be automated reliably. By mid-2023, they had something that worked well enough to use on their own meetings every day.
Notarail launched publicly in late 2023. The product still has the same narrow mandate it started with: extract the commitments, assign the owners, push the tasks. We don't try to be a better transcript tool. There are plenty of those.
Three people, one problem
Led product at a logistics SaaS and a fintech org between 2019 and 2022, both distributed across multiple time zones. Started building Notarail in late 2022 after watching the same ownership breakdown repeat itself at two different companies.
Four years building NLP infrastructure and speaker-diarization pipelines at a voice-analytics company before co-founding Notarail. Designed the extraction model and the speaker-attribution system that resolves "someone should" into a named owner.
Previously a PM at a project-management software company, where he spent three years studying how teams actually use the tools they're assigned. Joined Notarail to build the integration layer and the meeting-type template system — the parts that make extracted items land correctly in Jira, Linear, Notion, and Asana.
How we think about building
A meeting produces two things: context (what was discussed) and commitments (what needs to happen next). We care about the second list. The context is available in the transcript if you need it — but the output that matters is the set of named, dated action items.
A distributed team shouldn't need a follow-up meeting to coordinate what came out of a meeting. When action items land in a project tool with a name and a due date, the async handoff is complete. No status thread, no follow-up Slack, no PM bottleneck.
We're bootstrapped and intend to stay focused. Notarail does one thing: make standups produce real work. We're not building a meeting assistant, a collaboration hub, or a note-taking app. Features that don't make that core loop better don't ship.