Overview
Rewatch gave teams a searchable library for workplace video. It organized recordings, generated transcripts, and later added an AI meeting assistant. Connor Sears and Scott Goldman started the company in 2020 after working at GitHub, where an internal video library had shown Sears how recordings could help a distributed team. a16z · Founders Talk
Atlassian acquired Rewatch in 2024 and brought its meeting technology into Loom, the video product Atlassian had acquired earlier. Atlassian's later releases describe meeting recordings and AI notes within Loom and Confluence. Atlassian · Atlassian earnings call
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Founding Story
Sears was a senior product design leader at GitHub; Goldman was a principal engineer there. Both had experienced distributed work and the challenge of retaining information shared in meetings. At GitHub, an internal tool called GitHub TV gathered video for colleagues who could not attend live. a16z · Founders Talk
In a 2022 interview, Sears recalled starting to write code in March 2020, just before widespread COVID lockdowns. Sears recalled that he was “selling Rewatch before we had anything in production.” The team approached GitHub as a potential customer while its product was still at the sketch stage. He described Goldman as having built enterprise software before; that experience mattered for selling a library intended to hold sensitive internal recordings. Founders Talk
Timeline
- Early 2020: Sears and Goldman founded Rewatch. a16z
- May 2021: Andreessen Horowitz announced its investment. Its account named GitHub, Brex, PlanetScale, Stedi, and The Athletic as users. a16z
- 2022: Sears described the product's internal GitHub inspiration and the challenge of making it useful across tools and teams. Founders Talk
- August 2024: Atlassian announced Rewatch would join it and that Rewatch technology would be integrated into Loom. Atlassian
- 2025: Atlassian documented Loom AI meeting notes in Confluence. Atlassian documentation
What They Built
Rewatch collected recordings from tools such as Zoom into a company video library. Teams could organize them into collections, add permissions and tags, search automatic transcripts, and comment. A person who missed an all-hands meeting could search for a decision rather than replay the entire recording. a16z
The product expanded from a place to find recordings toward a meeting assistant that could record, summarize, and extract action items. Atlassian planned to connect the assistant to calendars and make transcripts and meeting notes available across its products under existing permissions. Atlassian
Calendar integration was a practical part of the work. Loom's Joe Thomas told TechCrunch that handling unusual calendar cases involved more friction than most other parts of the Rewatch stack. A meeting bot has to join the right event, respect participant access, and deliver the result to the right people; a transcript alone does not solve that workflow. TechCrunch via Yahoo
Market Position
Rewatch served organizations with recorded meetings and distributed teams. It competed for overlapping jobs with video libraries, screen-recording tools, and meeting-note services. Loom, acquired by Atlassian in 2023, already helped teams record and share asynchronous videos. Rewatch added a live-meeting capture and notes workflow to that platform. Atlassian
A video library becomes more useful when people trust its permissions and can find information across tools. That makes integration and distribution significant: Atlassian could place meeting outputs alongside Confluence and Jira, where teams already document and track work. Those capabilities also make Loom a current competitor for anyone rebuilding Rewatch's core workflow.
Business Model
Rewatch sold software to teams and enterprises. a16z's investment announcement named several customers but did not disclose revenue or a total customer count. Public sources reviewed here do not establish the acquisition price, investor return, or the startup's profitability. a16z
Outcome and evolution
Atlassian welcomed the Rewatch team in August 2024. Its January 2025 earnings call explicitly referred to the Rewatch acquisition and said the technology was moving into meeting summaries. The announcement described planned features; later Atlassian documentation shows Loom meeting notes creating Confluence pages. The available sources do not establish which individual Rewatch components were retained unchanged. Atlassian · Earnings call · Documentation
One third-party directory reports that the standalone Rewatch service closed in January 2026. Its source notice was not independently verified for this report, so the precise shutdown date remains uncertain. The separate question of acquisition is supported by Atlassian's earnings call. AI Tool Graveyard
Key Lessons
Rewatch grew from a specific internal workflow into a product for other organizations. Its acquisition shows why searchable recordings became more valuable when connected to existing documents and tasks. The deal does not establish whether the company was profitable or why its founders chose the transaction.
Sources
Sources include a16z's investment account, Sears's founder interview, and Atlassian's announcement.