Earlier this year, Medal, a company known for its video game clipping technology, introduced Highlight, an AI-powered assistant designed for cross-platform use. Highlight has now spun off as a separate entity and successfully raised $10 million in a funding round.
The investment was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Valor, SV Angel, and Conviction Embed. Medal itself contributed $3 million from the $13 million it had raised in July. Pim de Witte, co-founder of Medal, is now the only direct connection between the two companies, while Highlight has formed its own team, including notable figures such as Haris Butt, formerly the VP of Design at ClickUp, and Mark Bond, Medal’s first head of growth.
Highlight began as a research project within Medal, focusing on bridging large language models (LLMs) with real-time screen activity. De Witte explained that separating Highlight as its own company would allow it to grow faster and attract engineers by offering equity.
Highlight is a desktop app that enables users to attach various forms of context, such as screenshots, voice notes, or documents, and ask questions using an LLM. The app also features the ability to transcribe audio from meetings, making it possible to reference and query specific parts of a conversation later on.
Users can perform common tasks with the app, such as summarizing, rewriting, and explaining attached context. Initially, Highlight allowed developers to create apps on top of its platform, but the company has since expanded its approach. Users can now create custom actions using simple prompts, such as summarizing the first 10 minutes of a meeting, with the goal of sharing these automations across the community.
For more technically inclined developers, Highlight plans to offer an agentic framework that can perform background tasks, such as summarizing documents from a specified folder.
"Our vision is to create virtual employees, enabling users to delegate tasks and free up their time," said de Witte.
Along with these developments, Highlight has introduced a push-to-talk shortcut and a new app for recording meetings. Niko Bonatsos, managing director at General Catalyst, praised the app's ease of use, highlighting its ability to integrate on-screen context and automation. He noted that this approach stands out compared to other AI tools that rely solely on chat interfaces.
While Highlight AI is currently free to use, the company plans to introduce a pricing model based on the word count processed by the assistant in the future.
