'We Have So Much Money Coming In’: This Startup Has Already Sold More Than 200,000 Units of an Unexpectedly Popular Product

Searching for a reliable voice recorder? Pocket, a startup that went through the famed accelerator Y Combinator, is betting that you’ll pay $199 for an AI notetaker that snaps onto the back of a smartphone and records, transcribes and summarizes conversations.

Pocket co-founder and CEO Akshay Narisetti recently told Business Insider that the company has reached a $100 million run rate just eight months after its launch. Run rate allows companies to predict annual revenue by taking short-term data, usually for a month, and extending it over a full year.

Other AI devices have failed after a season of hype, like Humane’s Ai Pin, which fell short of customer expectations and experienced overheating. The company was ultimately sold to HP for parts last year. Pocket is betting that its AI recorder, unlike the Ai Pin, is more than just a trend.

“It’s only going to go up from here,” Narisetti told Business Insider.

Pocket offers basic recording, standard transcription and core summaries with no monthly fee. If users want unlimited cloud storage and advanced AI features, they have to pay extra. A Pocket Pro subscription costs $16.50 to $20 a month, or about $200 to $250 a year.

“We have so much money coming in from subscriptions,” Narisetti said.

Narisetti disclosed that Pocket has sold more than 200,000 devices and is growing at a rate of 50% a month. He claimed that the startup, which has just 12 employees, could reach a $1 billion run rate within the next two years.

Narisetti met Pocket’s co-founder Gabriel Dymowski at The Residency, a hacker house in San Francisco. The duo initially created an app that took meeting notes but found that users wanted hardware to record in-person appointments and meetings. Their user base was doctors and salespeople who had back-to-back, face-to-face conversations with patients and clients.

Narisetti and Dymowski tried different types of devices, like glasses and pendants, before ultimately settling on a thin credit-card-like structure.

The startup pinpoints most of its growth to direct-to-consumer sales and word of mouth. Narisetti disclosed that less than 10% of revenue comes from Amazon, and 85% of its sales come from the U.S.

In the coming years, Pocket plans to expand into retail and international markets.

Pocket pushback and competition

Pocket and similar AI notetakers have sparked privacy concerns in Silicon Valley. According to a Wall Street Journal report last month, critics say recording often happens without explicit consent.

Narisetti argues Pocket is more transparent because users place the device visibly on a table and manually activate it, unlike always-listening wearables that can record discreetly.

The company is competing with AI note-taking features from Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams, along with startups such as Granola.