Summary
Y Combinator sits down with Ali Haghani, co-founder and CEO of Circleback, an AI meeting intelligence platform that came out of the YC Winter 2024 batch. The conversation covers how Circleback goes beyond simple transcription: it records and summarizes meetings, assigns action items, extracts structured data for CRMs and issue trackers, and surfaces answers across an entire organization’s conversation history — what Haghani describes as a “company brain.”
Haghani walks through several non-obvious use cases his team has built internally, including using Circleback as a lightweight ATS to track interview candidates across every touchpoint, and connecting it to Slack so that customer support and inbound sales threads automatically capture structured follow-up tasks. He also demos querying across historical meetings — for example, asking what a specific customer’s wishlist was from a meeting months earlier and then drafting an update email.
The interview touches on the broader thesis behind Circleback’s product direction: that recording and organizing company conversations will become standard operating procedure for most businesses, not just a productivity tool for individual users. Haghani also discusses how his own coding workflow has shifted toward using Claude Code as an orchestration layer, reflecting a pattern he says he noticed broadly in the developer community around late 2025.
📺 Source: Y Combinator · Published August 11, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
