Scribe co-founders Jennifer Smith and Aaron Podolny
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EIt’s very company these days. I want to find a way to automate People’s work with AI. It turns out that AI can help with that too.
Scribe, a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2019, creates browser extensions that sit on employees’ laptops, record their screens, and silently monitor their work. Scribe’s AI software can automatically generate step-by-step guides and tutorials with annotated screenshots and clickable instructions that provide companies with insight into the steps involved in repetitive tasks, as well as clearly explain how different teams work.
This is also great for teaching AI agents the way humans work: what to do, what tools to use, and how to handle different tasks on their own. “Companies are realizing that they need to make their organizations more readable for humans and agents,” says Jennifer Smith, CEO and co-founder.
Today, 80,000 customers including LinkedIn, HubSpot, and T-Mobile use Scribe’s guides to train new employees on complex workflows, eliminate inefficiencies, and save time and money. (Teacher agents, not humans, are still in their infancy.)
Thanks to Scribe, Klaviyo, a $1.2 billion (2025 revenue) marketing software company, learned that its sales reps were spending hours switching between different tools to find information about prospects. This process could potentially be automated in the future. At another company, Scribe found that customer service representatives had to use 20 different tools, including email and Teams, to answer a simple customer question: “Where is my order?” At the third point, Scribe found that support personnel spent more than 400 hours copying and pasting between different systems.
The AI wave has been a tailwind for Scribe’s growth. The company announced Monday that its annual recurring revenue exceeded $100 million in April. This equates to approximately $8.3 million in revenue for the month. More than 6 million employees have Scribe’s app installed on their laptops, and companies pay everything from $20 subscriptions to five- to seven-figure contracts. About 600,000 organizations use the free version of the app, which lets you record what people do in their browsers, while paid plans can also record desktop applications. The startup’s AI model, built on systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, recorded and analyzed 15 million different workflows, such as onboarding new employees, managing tickets, and interacting with customers, and observed how people worked across 40,000 business applications. The San Francisco-based startup was valued at $1.3 billion after raising $75 million in a Series C round in November.
The startup’s roots go back to Smith’s days as a consultant. More than 15 years ago, while working as a business analyst at McKinsey, Smith realized that most companies actual Employees spent hours clicking, typing, copying and pasting between different applications.
How bosses could find out what people were doing to make their employees more efficient was even more arduous. Mr. Smith pulled up a chair behind his employees, peered over their shoulders, took notes on exactly what they did, and interviewed dozens of employees who found better ways to use the tools. “Institutional know-how exists in people’s heads,” she says. “It’s probably, [a business’] It’s your most important asset, and it’s not something you can physically own, see, or use. ”
Smith was convinced there was a better way than hovering over employees’ shoulders (albeit awkwardly). The answer is “AI”. In the summer of 2019, she teamed up with co-founder Aaron Podolny to launch Scribe. The company offers two products: Scribe Capture, which records your workflow and turns it into a guide, and Scribe Optimize, which analyzes all your data to find and improve inefficiencies. According to Smith, the app only captures data from business applications such as Slack and Salesforce. Anonymize data by identifying trends at the team level rather than monitoring individual activity, such as where employees spend the most time. “It’s designed to measure work, not workers,” Smith said. (In other words, Scribe isn’t monitoring whether people watch YouTube on their lunch break. But you’ll have to take our word for it.)
Tools to track and record employee work to improve productivity have existed for decades, but so-called “bossware” has exploded during the pandemic, much to the chagrin of employees. Thanks to AI, such tools are becoming increasingly prominent and sophisticated, tracking everything from keystrokes and mouse movements to clicks. In late April, Meta announced to its thousands of employees that it would track everything they do on their computers to train AI models in their daily work. Employees were furious, calling the decision an invasion of privacy and a “callous” decision. new york times Reported. Such monitoring tools could clearly be used to find roles to cut, as tech giants like Meta cut thousands of jobs to balance the billions they are spending on AI.
Scribe customers claim that the application is not meant to monitor workers, but rather to deeply answer the question, “What do we do here?” Then think about how you can improve it. Klaviyo senior director Glenn Vanderlann says having transparency among employees about what is and isn’t tracked by the app was key to rolling out the tool. “If someone tries to access ESPN.com… we don’t care. Well, that’s fine. We’re not going to track that,” he said, adding that employees have the option to opt out.
Mike Dauber, a general partner at Amplify and an investor in Scribe, compares what Scribe is doing for thousands of companies in the AI era to how human drivers initially drove Waymos to map cities around San Francisco before rolling out self-driving cars a few years later. “You can’t automate things if you don’t map them first,” he says. But of course, Waymo doesn’t need these drivers anymore.
