Tech
Talat’s AI meeting notes stay on your machine, not in the cloud
The AI-powered notetaking app Granola, valued at $250 million, has become a popular tool among tech industry founders and VCs. But one developer believes there’s demand for a more private, local-only alternative that’s available for a one-time fee and without a subscription. That’s led to the creation of a new Mac app called Talat.
Yorkshire, England-based developer Nick Payne, a self-described computer nerd, says the idea to build a local AI notetaker came about mostly because of a series of happy accidents.
“I think Granola is awesome; it’s a shining example of what you can do with an Electron app [a framework for building desktop applications] given enough love and care,” he told TechCrunch. “When I first tried it, I was fascinated that it managed to record system audio on my Mac without recording video, which was the standard workaround at the time. That led to a ton of research, discovering a relatively new and poorly documented Apple API.”
To make it easier to work with that API (Core Audio Taps, which lets developers tap into a Mac’s audio streams), Payne decided to create an open source audio library, AudioTee.
“During that time, I was slowly piecing together a toolkit, but I never found anything that felt like it could stand on its own as a product rather than just a cool tech demo,” Payne said. “The state-of-the-art hosted transcription models — the same providers folks like Granola use — are incredible, and it’s viscerally cool to see your speech unfurled onscreen in near real time. But it always nagged me that the trade-off required providing not just my data, but my audio data; my actual voice,” he added.
He then stumbled upon a software toolkit called FluidAudio, a Swift framework that enables fully local, low-latency audio AI on Apple devices. It lets you run small, fast transcription models directly on the Mac’s Neural Engine — Apple’s dedicated hardware for AI processing.
That was the piece that made Payne realize he could turn his research into an actual product — one where your audio never leaves your Mac and your transcripts aren’t stored on another company’s servers.
Talat, which was built alongside Payne’s longtime friend and former colleague Mike Franklin, is the result of Payne’s interest in the audio space. The result is a 20MB, one-time purchase that doesn’t require you to create an account or even share analytics data back with the developers. There are no ongoing fees, either.
While some AI notetakers may have more bells and whistles, Talat offers a streamlined set of features. It captures audio from your computer’s microphone when you’re in meeting apps like Zoom, Teams, Meet, and others, and transcribes it in real time. The app tries to assign speakers in real time, but you can reassign them as needed. You can also take notes, plus edit, delete, or split transcript segments. When the meeting finishes, a local LLM generates a summary with key points, decisions, and action items.
The notes, transcripts, and summaries are all searchable in Talat, too.
In addition to the privacy angle, Payne said the goal is to give users more options.
“We’re leaning into configurability and letting users control where their data goes: pick your own LLM, auto-export to [notetaking app] Obsidian, webhooks that push data out when a meeting finishes, an MCP server,” which is a standardized way for AI tools to connect to outside data sources, “to pull it on demand,” he explained.
Under the hood, the AI is a mixture — “mostly stitched together and abstracted behind FluidAudio,” Payne noted, which he credits with doing a lot of the heavy lifting. For the summarization piece, the app defaults to an Al model called Qwen3-4B-4bit, which can run on even fairly modest hardware.
However, users can opt to switch that out to any cloud LLM provider of their choice, or they can choose between two Parakeet variants — speech-recognition models developed by Nvidia — or point it at Ollama (a tool for running AI models locally), giving them more control over the experience. In time, Talat will add support for more built-in choices and will have integrations for other apps, like Google Calendar and Notion.
At launch, users with M-series Mac computers (those running Apple’s own processors, starting with the M1) can download the app and try it out for free with 10 hours of recordings before deciding to purchase.
Talat is available for $49 while in this pre-release version, which is still under active development.
When the app hits a 1.0 release, the price will increase to $99.
Payne and Franklin are bootstrapping Talat and plan to keep the core product a one-time purchase going forward.
Tech
Glean’s top line crosses $300M as AI budget cutting becomes its major selling point
Glean, a company often described as the Google for enterprise, said it has reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a three-fold increase from the $100 million milestone it reached just 15 months ago.
While many AI startups are growing at a blistering pace, Glean’s progress is particularly remarkable. After years of essentially being the only player in the category, the seven-year-old startup is accelerating its growth as tech giants enter the enterprise AI search market with rival products.
“The first four or five years of our existence, we had no competition,” Glean CEO Arvind Jain told TechCrunch. “Given how important search is to make AI work in the enterprise, every single company in the world wants to be in this space.”
Tech heavyweights building Glean-like tools include Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Atlassian.
Jain maintains there’s value in being a first mover in the space, but that it’s also equally important to offer a better product.
What Glean does better than its competition, according to Jain, comes down to the deep understanding that its AI tools have of customers’ business needs. Glean’s AI achieves this knowledge — a concept captured by the new, popular term “context graph” — by connecting to and learning from enterprises’ internal software systems.
Jain claims that Glean’s context graph also helps enterprises cut AI computing costs.
“If you connect your AI to Glean, it gives you all the information that you need to do your work, and that results in AI consuming far fewer tokens compared to if you unleash AI onto your systems directly,” Jain said. That’s because with Glean, AI ends up performing fewer operations, he added.
At a time when many companies are blowing through their AI budgets, those token cost savings have become a major selling point for the company.
“One of the things you know our customers really like about Glean is the fact that we can reduce your AI bill significantly,” he said.
The company, which was last valued at $7.2 billion when it raised a $150 million Series F last June, offers various pricing structures to its customers, which include Databricks, Reddit, Pinterest, and Samsung.
According to Jain, Glean offers both a consumption-based model, where clients pay per use, and a hybrid model that combines a fixed monthly fee for active users with separate usage fees for model consumption.
Glean is definitely not the first company to do this, but it’s worth pointing out that the company’s $300 million milestone cannot be fully described as traditional ARR, because a consumption model by definition doesn’t have a strictly recurring component.
Pure consumption pricing models depend on fluctuating user activity rather than predictable subscription renewals, therefore a portion of Glean’s top line is more accurately described as an annualized revenue run rate.
Glean did not immediately respond to a request for comment; this post will be updated if the company replies.
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Tech
Final 24 hours to save up to $410 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ticket
This is it. The countdown is almost over. You now have until tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT to lock in Early Bird savings of up to $410 for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 before prices increase.
If Disrupt has been on your must-attend list, this is your final chance to secure the lowest available rates before the next price jump hits. Once the deadline passes, so do the savings.
Register now and join 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and innovators at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 13–15 for three days packed with networking, startup discovery, and conversations shaping the future of tech. Bring a plus-one at 50%, or bring a group to get an up to 30% discount.
What makes Disrupt worth attending year after year
TechCrunch Disrupt is where startup momentum accelerates. The event brings together the people actively building, funding, and scaling what’s next across AI, fintech, SaaS, climate, cybersecurity, consumer tech, and beyond.
Attendees come to Disrupt for:
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With 300+ exhibiting startups, Startup Battlefield 200, curated networking experiences, and multiple stages of programming, Disrupt is built to help attendees make meaningful connections and real business progress.
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Hear directly from tech leaders shaping the industry
Every year, Disrupt brings together hundreds of influential voices across startups and venture capital. Past speakers have included leaders from the companies and firms shaping the future of AI, enterprise software, fintech, consumer tech, and more.
This year will deliver the same high-caliber experience, with 200+ sessions across six industry-focused stages, plus roundtables and breakouts covering scaling, AI, fintech, infrastructure, robotics, and emerging technologies. Explore the growing agenda to see the latest sessions and speaker announcements.
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Tech
Today is the last day to apply to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 returns October 13–15 to Moscone West in San Francisco — and applications to speak are open for just a few more hours.
We’re inviting founders, investors, operators, and technology experts to apply for a chance to take the stage at one of the most influential tech events of the year.
More than 10,000 startup and VC leaders will gather at Disrupt 2026 to explore what’s next in AI, scaling, fintech, infrastructure, robotics, and the future of innovation.
Applications close tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now to share your expertise and help shape the conversations defining the tech industry.
Pick your session format
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Breakout Sessions: A 30-minute talk (up to 4 speakers, including a moderator) with a 20-minute audience Q&A. Capacity: 100 attendees.
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