Ishiki Labs

Roadmap & Position in Conversational AI

Builds socially aware AI meeting assistants that know when to speak and when to stay silent.

Company Overview

Builds socially aware, real-time AI meeting assistants (Fern) that use multimodal LLMs and proprietary social intelligence to join professional conversations as invisible copilots or active participants, providing expert opinions, coaching, and task delegation.

What They're Building

The company's public product roadmap & what they're committed to building.

Ishiki Labs has publicly announced Fern, their real-time AI meeting assistant with dual-mode operation (Full Presence and Shadow Mode), real-time expert opinions, and task delegation. Speeds comparable to ChatGPT Voice and Gemini Live. Expansion into sales coaching, deeper meeting platform integrations, and socially aware AI that knows when to speak and when to stay silent.

Latest Intelligence

Zeitgeist tracks private signals to determine where the company is heading strategically.

Social Awareness Becomes The Meeting Wedge

May 13, 2026

Confidence:

High

New Intel: Ishiki Labs is building Fern, a meeting assistant with shadow mode, active participation, and social awareness. The wedge is knowing when to speak in live conversations, a harder problem than summarizing calls.

Founder and Key Execs

Amit Yadav, Co-Founder & CTO

Co-Founder & CTO

Robert Xu, Co-Founder & CEO

Co-Founder & CEO

Founder Force Multiplier

Ishiki Labs combines rare expertise from Meta's most advanced AI and AR/VR programs with real-time systems engineering from Citadel Securities, enabling them to build socially intelligent AI that understands human conversational dynamics at a level competitors focused purely on.

Funding History

2025 | Amit Yadav and Robert Xu found Ishiki Labs.
2026 | $500K Seed round, 1 undisclosed investor.
2026 | Accepted into Y Combinator W26 batch.

Competitors

AI Meeting Assistants

Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Grain (transcription/summarization-focused).

AI Sales Copilots

Gong, Chorus (now ZoomInfo), Clari Copilot.

Real-Time AI Agents

Google Gemini Live, OpenAI ChatGPT Voice, Recall.ai.

Socially Aware AI

Hume AI (emotion AI), Cogito (behavioral AI for calls).

Ishiki Labs

's Moat:

Social intelligence (knowing when to speak, when to stay silent, reading conversational cues) is a technically harder problem than transcription or summarization. Meta AR/VR and Citadel Securities real-time systems backgrounds give the team rare expertise in low-latency multimodal processing. Meeting transcription is commoditized; live participation is not.

How They're Leveraging AI

Social-Aware Multimodal Inference

Fern acts as an invisible, socially aware AI copilot in live meetings, understanding conversational dynamics to deliver contextually appropriate interventions without interrupting natural flow.

Real-Time Sentiment Analysis

Fern provides live, context-aware sales coaching during calls by analyzing prospect sentiment, objection patterns, and conversational momentum to deliver real-time tactical recommendations to sales reps.

Multimodal Data Curation

The IshikiLabs Capture app collects structured, high-quality audio and visual data from real-world interactions with real-time quality checks, building proprietary training datasets for socially aware AI models.

AI Use Overview:

Using social-aware multimodal inference from audio and video, real-time sentiment analysis during calls, and multimodal data curation for training.

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