In this series, we talk with the founders and CEOs behind the top AI notetaking tools to learn how they’re built, what they do best, and how they fit into real sales and CS workflows.

In this video, we got into a deep dive with Ali Haghani, founder of Circleback.

Watch to see how Circleback stands out with structured meeting summaries, flexible workflows, and a fast, polished product experience.

Meet Circleback

Circleback was founded in 2023 by Ali Haghani and his cofounder, who left their engineering jobs to solve a problem they’d seen firsthand: important meeting context was getting lost across teams. They built Circleback to make conversations easier to capture, summarize, and act on - not just for individuals, but across entire organizations.

The product prioritizes speed, accuracy, and clarity. From clean notes and clear action items to structured outcomes and powerful automations, Circleback helps teams get more out of every meeting. Today, it's a fast-moving team backed by Y Combinator and focused on building a tool that fits naturally into how you already work.

Feature highlights

Structured, editable meeting notes‍

Circleback captures meetings with a clean structure: overview, discussion topics, and clearly assigned action items. It pulls out specifics like exact dates, dollar amounts, and goals. Everything is editable in the interface, so teams can make quick updates without switching tools.

Supports Zoom, Meet, Teams, in-person, and uploads‍

You can capture conversations across any meeting type. Circleback can join Zoom, Meet, or Teams calls, record in-person conversations using the mobile app, or analyze uploaded files like Zoom recordings or voice memos.

Powerful AI search with full context‍

Ask questions like “How is Sarah using Circleback?” and get a direct answer, including the exact moment in the meeting where it was discussed. You can also search by participant email, company domain, or meeting title to quickly find relevant calls.

Extract structured insights from calls‍

Define exactly what you want to capture. Circleback can pull data like company name, employee count, or product feedback from meetings and display it in structured tables. Each data point links to the meeting moment where it was mentioned.

Automations that fit your workflow‍

You can set up rules based on tags, participants, or meeting names. Automations can post notes and insights to Slack, push updates to HubSpot, or share meetings with teammates automatically, based on your own logic.

Granular privacy and retention controls‍

Meetings are private by default. Even admins cannot view them unless they are explicitly shared. You can set team-wide data retention rules and choose whether to store recordings at all. Circleback gives users full control over what’s kept and what’s deleted.

Designed to scale with your team‍

Automations and workflows can be built once and shared with the entire team. This makes it easy to enforce consistency across departments without requiring every user to manually tag or organize their meetings.

Flexible integrations beyond the core‍

In addition to HubSpot and Slack, you can connect Circleback to other tools through Zapier, Make, or custom webhooks. These integrations give you full access to notes, transcripts, action items, and meeting metadata.

Why Circleback stands out

Circleback is one of the cleanest tools we tested. The notes are sharp, detailed, and actually useful. It was one of only three tools that made our top picks for best out-of-the-box meeting notes.

What makes it different:
→ Notes highlight specific numbers, dates, and goals from the call so nothing gets lost
→ Automations route insights and action items to Slack, HubSpot, or your CRM based on meeting type
→ Works across Zoom, in-person meetings, phone calls, and imported recordings
→ Recordings and notes stay private by default, with flexible sharing and retention settings

One thing we loved:
You can define the exact insights you want extracted from calls, like customer size or goals, and Circleback will automatically pull that data into a structured format after every meeting.

Try Circleback for yourself

Circleback makes it easy to get started. You can capture your next Zoom, in-person, or phone call in just a few minutes. Start your free trial →