Some founders build tools. Some founders build leverage. Quill just raised $6.5M to build something more dangerous than both. San Francisco based Quill secured a $6.5M seed round led by Basis Set Ventures, with 500 Global, Naval Ravikant, Morado Ventures, and AME Cloud Ventures stepping in like they have seen this movie before and know how it ends. When that lineup writes checks, it is not charity. It is conviction.
Congratulations to Michael Daugherty, Co Founder and CEO, and Nick Adams, Co Founder and former Managing Director at AME Cloud Ventures and Zoom board member. Also to Yacob Berhane, Founding COO, and Clayton Bryan, Head of Enterprise. This is a team that understands distribution, capital, and the quiet math of execution.
Now let’s talk about what Quill actually does, because this is where it gets interesting. Most artificial intelligence meeting tools are note takers with good PR. Quill decided to go sovereign. Local first architecture. Audio transcribed directly on device. No bot lurking in your Zoom. No data siphoned into some black box hoping compliance does not notice. Cloud sync is optional and end to end encrypted. Users choose where inference runs, including Google Vertex, AWS Bedrock, or fully local models. For regulated industries, that detail is not cosmetic. It is oxygen.
And then there is Quilliam. The Chief of AI Staff. Not a gimmick. A coordinator. It listens to conversations, understands context, and then drives workflows across tools through Model Context Protocol connections to Notion, Linear, Affinity, Obsidian, Airtable, Manus, Gamma. Meetings stop being a memory exercise and start becoming operational fuel.
Think about that for a second. Most executives live in conversations. Deals, diligence, product debates, hiring calls. The value is in the dialogue, but the follow through dies in the shuffle. Quill treats conversation as the system of record. That is not a feature. That is a philosophy.
The business takeaway is simple and sharp. They did not chase mass market noise. They aimed at security conscious, high stakes operators who cannot afford sloppy artificial intelligence. Build for the people who feel the pain the hardest. Design for sovereignty in a world addicted to convenience. Investors notice when a company understands its buyer at that level.
There is a reason this round came together with that syndicate. Quill is not trying to be another meeting summary app. It is positioning itself as the connective tissue between human dialogue and machine execution.
