Hugo

Hugo, founded in 2018 by Josh Lowy and Darren Chait, emerged from the co-founders' direct experiences with inefficient meetings. Lowy, previously a product manager, and Chait, a former corporate lawyer, identified a critical gap in how teams connect meeting outcomes with their daily work. Their initial product focused on meeting preparation, but they pivoted after observing how their internal practice of sharing detailed meeting notes in public Slack channels dramatically improved team alignment and accelerated problem-solving. This pivot led to the creation of Hugo as a connected meeting notes platform.

The company provides a cloud-based software designed to centralize and manage meeting-related information for teams, particularly those in hybrid or remote work environments. Hugo's platform integrates with a user's calendar (Google and Office 365), allowing for the creation of collaborative agendas, real-time note-taking during meetings, and the seamless conversion of discussion points into actionable tasks. The core of the business model is to make meeting notes searchable, shareable, and integrated with over 20 other productivity tools, such as Slack, Jira, Asana, Trello, and Salesforce. This transforms static notes into dynamic assets that drive workflows, ensuring decisions and customer insights are captured and actioned upon across the organization. The platform served clients ranging from small teams to large enterprises, including notable names like Adobe, Netflix, Spotify, and Dropbox.

Hugo operated on a freemium model, offering a free version for small teams and paid tiers with advanced features for larger businesses. In April 2020, the company secured $6.1 million in a seed funding round led by Google's AI-focused fund, Gradient Ventures, with participation from the Slack Fund. Sometime after August 2022, Hugo was acquired by Calendly and the product is no longer available for new sale.

Keywords: meeting productivity, collaborative notes, agenda management, task management, meeting workflow, remote team collaboration, meeting intelligence, Josh Lowy, Darren Chait, Google Ventures, Slack Fund, calendar integration, Jira integration, Asana integration, Salesforce integration, meeting minutes software, action items, team alignment, corporate communications, workplace productivity, Calendly acquisition