Sponsor disclosure: Fellow is a Value Add VC sponsor. Value Add VC wrote this review and keeps editorial control, and every product fact below was checked on fellow.ai as of October 9, 2026. Sponsorship does not buy rankings; see our editorial standards.
The meeting notes that matter most in venture are the ones from calls where nobody wants a recorder in the room.
Founder pitches, LP updates, co-investment conversations and board prep all share a problem. You want a complete record, but a bot joining the call as a named participant changes how people talk. Fellow is an AI meeting notetaker built around that tension: it records from your computer instead of sending a bot, and it was designed for teams that care about privacy, security and data governance.
Fellow says more than 5,000 teams use it, and it describes itself as purpose-built for private equity, hedge funds, venture capital and investment banking. This review covers what the product does, what each plan costs, how it handles security, and where it fits in a fund's workflow.
What Fellow Does
Records without a bot
Fellow's desktop apps for Mac and Windows capture meeting audio directly. No bot joins the call and no uninvited participant shows up in the list, across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. The same desktop capture covers in-person meetings, Slack Huddles and Webex, and a mobile app captures notes on the go.
Turns calls into summaries and action items
After each meeting Fellow produces an AI summary that surfaces what matters and pulls out action items automatically, so follow-ups from a founder meeting or a portfolio check-in don't depend on someone's handwriting.
Answers questions across your meetings
Ask Fellow lets you query your meeting history in plain language, and Fellow can connect that meeting record to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. For a fund, that turns months of first meetings into something you can search by company, founder or topic.
Pushes notes into the systems you already run
On the Business plan, notes flow to Salesforce and HubSpot. Fellow also integrates with project tools including Asana, Jira, Linear, Monday, ClickUp and Trello, with Zapier, Glean and MCP, and with Global Relay for communications archiving. The Team plan adds Confluence and Notion.
Why Bot-Free Recording Matters for Investors
Most AI notetakers join your call as a bot by default. In an internal standup that is harmless. In investor meetings it changes the conversation: founders get more guarded when they see a recorder in the participant list, and LPs discussing fund performance or co-investment interest often speak less freely. Some institutional LPs also have policies about recorded calls.
Fellow avoids that by recording from your own machine. Recording laws still apply: consent rules differ by US state and in the EU, so the person running the call should still know their jurisdiction and tell participants when a call is being recorded. Fellow's Enterprise plan adds advanced recording permissions, which helps a firm set one policy for everyone.
Pricing
Per user per month, as listed on Fellow's pricing page as of October 9, 2026:
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | Five AI notes and five recordings in total per user, AI summaries, transcription, action items, Ask Fellow, and Zoom, Meet, Teams and Slack integrations (up to 5 seats) |
| Team | $7 | $11 | 10 notes and 10 recordings per user a month, meeting automations, project management, Confluence and Notion integrations, API access (up to 20 seats) |
| Business | $15 | $23 | Unlimited notes and recordings, Salesforce and HubSpot, sales recap templates, org-wide meeting templates, keyword tracking (up to 50 seats) |
| Enterprise | $25 | Contact sales | From 10 users: advanced recording permissions, domain control, user provisioning, SSO with Okta or OneLogin, org-wide analytics, AI-powered CRM field updates, transcript redaction |
The Free plan needs no credit card, and Team and Business can be tried free before you pay. Fellow's startup program offers up to 25% off a startup's first-year bill. For most funds the Business plan is the natural starting point: it removes the recording caps and adds the CRM push that makes notes useful across a team.
Security and Data Controls
Fellow lists SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance and states that it does not use your meeting data to train AI models. For regulated firms, the Global Relay integration connects meeting records to communications archiving, and the Enterprise plan adds domain control, user provisioning, SSO and transcript redaction.
Those controls are the main reason a fund would choose Fellow over a consumer-grade notetaker. When a meeting record includes a founder's unreleased numbers or an LP's allocation plans, who can record, who can see the transcript and where it is stored are questions the firm, not each partner, should answer.
How Fellow Fits a Fund's Workflow
Sourcing and first meetings
Record founder calls without a bot, get the summary and action items afterwards, and push the notes to Salesforce or HubSpot so the next partner sees the history.
Portfolio check-ins and board prep
Use Ask Fellow to pull what a company said about burn, hiring or its next raise across several quarters of check-ins.
LP and co-investor calls
Keep a complete record of sensitive conversations without a recorder in the participant list, with recording permissions set firm-wide on Enterprise.
Firm operations
Org-wide meeting templates and admin analytics give the operating team one view of how meetings run across the firm.
How Fellow Compares With Granola, Fathom and Fireflies
Fellow is one of six tools in our guide to AI meeting note takers for investors, and you can see its plans and features at a glance on the Fellow overview page. Here is how it sits alongside three other popular tools.
- Granola also records without a bot and is built around enriching your own notes. Its pricing page lists HubSpot, Affinity and Attio on the $14 Business plan and Salesforce on the $35 Enterprise plan. Fellow includes Salesforce and HubSpot on its $15 Business plan.
- Fathom has a free plan with unlimited recordings, but joins calls as a bot by default, with a bot-free mode in beta on Mac, according to its pricing page.
- Fireflies.ai is built around a searchable team database and joins calls as a bot by default, with a Chrome extension that records without it.
Fellow's position is the overlap: bot-free capture like Granola, plus the team, CRM and governance features firms usually get from bot-based tools.
Who Should Use Fellow
Fellow fits funds and investment teams that want three things together: no bot in founder and LP calls, notes that land in Salesforce or HubSpot, and firm-level control over recording and data. Private equity, hedge fund, venture capital and investment banking teams are the users Fellow names itself, and teams on Windows can use the same desktop app as Mac users.
Getting started takes a few minutes: create a free account at fellow.ai with no credit card, install the Mac or Windows app, and connect your calendar and video tools. Teams can try the Team or Business plan free before paying, and startups can apply for up to 25% off a first-year bill. Good to know: the Free and Team plans include a set number of notes and recordings, and Business removes those limits and adds Salesforce and HubSpot, so most funds start there.
The verdict
Fellow gives a fund bot-free meeting records with the CRM push and data controls a firm needs, from $15 per user a month on Business.
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