Why we passed on the AI meeting-notes SaaS

It’s the most common pitch of 2026: AI meeting summaries, but this one’s different. We took one of those calls this month and passed. The transcript is not the moat.

What they had. A working product, real usage, a clean demo, and 40% week-over-week growth with zero CAC — classic seed-stage beautiful.

Why we passed:

1. Routing costs. Every feature was an LLM call, priced in someone else’s margin. Growth made the problem bigger, not smaller.
2. The incumbent is a keyboard shortcut. Notion, Zoom and Slack didn’t have to add this; they shipped it as a toggle.
3. No code to join. They wanted capital but not engineers on their repo. That’s the opposite of what we’re built to give.
4. Nobody was deleting anything. Retention was a cohort chart, not a habit.

What would have changed our mind: a wedge in a vertical where meetings are the product (hospitals, legal, displacement of an outsourced workflow), and a founder honest enough to show us the cost curve, not the growth curve.

Decision notes stay anonymous because signal matters more than ego.