Medal, a cross-platform AI assistant released just a few months ago as its flagship product from earlier this year, video game clipping- feature-making startup, is spinning off the entire business into an independent subsidiary that has raised $10 million in a funding round.

General Catalyst led the round, with participation from Valor, SV Angel and Conviction Embed. Medal, too, contributed $3 million in the new entity, out of its $13 million raised in July.

Really, the only common link now between Medal and Highlight is its co-founder, Pim de Witte, as the latter has its own in-house team, including Haris Butt, previously VP of Design at productivity company ClickUp. Also in that team is Medal co-founder Josh Lipson and Medal's first head of growth Mark Bond.

We began Highlight as a research project inside Medal. We wanted to explore the translation layer between LLMs and what's going on your screen. But we realized to grow quickly and hire engineers for a specific app by offering them equity, Highlight needs to be a separate entity, " de Witte says in an over-the-phone conversation with TechCrunch.

Highlight is a cross-platform app that provides an option to attach your screen, a voice note, or a document as context, and then you can pose questions to the LLM. It also transcribes your calls from system audio, so you can ask the LLM about something specific that was said during a meeting later.

You can do pretty run-of-the-mill things with AI assistants, such as summarizing and rewriting, but it can also highlight and explain context attached to the app at the time of querying.

In July, it opened its platform for developers to build apps on top of Highlight. The startup realized that that was pretty arbitrary and would only have it fully utilize this custom action in the hands of a handful of developers. With the new version, the company will allow its users to add their own prompts that will lead to custom action, such as summarizing the first 10 minutes of a meeting. But Highlight also wants to open up these prompts themselves to the community of users so that one person may discover a useful automation created by someone else.

For all those developers who actually know how to program, the company is opening an agentic framework that will let them use parts of your system and do small tasks, such as taking all the documents in a particular folder and summarizing them, in the background.
"Our idea is to create virtual employees so you can start delegating some of your tasks to them and have more time on your hands," de Witte said.

The company, through the announcement of today, is launching a push-to-talk shortcut and a new conversations app that records your meetings.

The managing director at General Catalyst, Niko Bonatsos, explained in an email to TechCrunch why he finds Highlight easy for users to understand: "It's really easy to understand what's happening from the context on-screen, and there are no complex prompts - I mean, no talking in inflection-free sentences".

"I was underwhelmed that most consumer-facing AI companies only allow you to interact with them through chat interfaces. That's a pretty uninspired design and, quite frankly, it limits what is possible with this really powerful new technology. We are very encouraged with the bold design choices Pim and his team have made to date," Bonatsos said, highlighting that how Highlight's automation works in conjunction with on-screen context allows users to make better use of AI.

Highlight AI is free to use for now, but the company wants to adopt a pricing plan based on the word count processed by the assistant down the line.