Recall
What is not verified
The headline figure, about US$9,000 a month in recurring revenue, rests on one source: Paul Richards's own interview with Starter Story, published on 19 October 2023. The 3-person team and the US$120,000 first check come from the same interview. There is no TrustMRR profile (a fetch of the profile address returned "Not found" on 24 October 2026), no Latka page, and no later revenue figure from the company, its investors or the press. A reader could look for a Stripe-verified revenue profile, an investor update, or a later interview with a dated figure. The headline number is grade D: one claim or one estimate, with no second source. Aiolum shows it because the story is useful, and marks it so that it is not mistaken for a verified figure.
Recall is a personal knowledge base, a private library of what one person has read, watched and written, organized so that it can be searched and reused. You save a web article, a YouTube video, a podcast, a PDF or a note. Recall writes a summary with an AI model, adds tags, and stores the item in a knowledge graph, a database of items and the links between them, so that an old item comes back when you save or read something related. It also makes quiz questions for spaced repetition, a study method that shows a question less often each time you answer it correctly.
Paul Richards, a South African software developer who had been one of the first employees at the link-analysis company Maltego, started Recall as a side project in early 2022 and showed it on Hacker News on 7 June 2022. In November 2022 a second Hacker News post, in which he asked whether he should give up, reached 493 points; he said in his Starter Story interview that an investor contacted him within 24 hours and wired US$120,000 against a SAFE. He brought in Igor Gligorevic as co-founder and CTO; the company's About page names Sankari Nair as the third co-founder and COO. In that interview, published on 19 October 2023, Richards said that Recall had just reached US$9,000 a month in recurring revenue, was growing 10% a month and had 3 full-time employees.
That figure is a single founder statement on a single date, so this page grades it D, reported and not verified. No payment processor or later interview confirms it, and Recall has published no revenue figure since. After it, the company says it went through Jason Calacanis's LAUNCH Accelerator in 2024 and stated in December 2024 that it had raised US$1.5 million in pre-seed money. In 2025 it posted openings for engineers in what it called a small remote team, and in October 2026 its own site claims more than 700,000 users.
The numbers, graded
Each row shows the evidence grade and the source numbers from the list at the end of this page. The grades are explained in How Aiolum verifies.
| Fact | Value | Grade | How we know | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring revenue per month, October 2023 | about US$9,000 ("just hit 9k USD", later in the same interview "just under 10k USD") | D | Paul Richards in his Starter Story interview, published 19 October 2023. One founder statement on one date. Not profitable yet; salaries were the largest cost. | [1] |
| Run rate from the October 2023 figure | about US$108,000 a year | calc | Calculated: US$9,000 times 12. It rests on the grade D figure above. | [1] |
| Growth rate, October 2023 | 10% a month | D | Founder in the same interview. No monthly series was published. | [1] |
| Team at the October 2023 figure | 3 full-time employees; Starter Story lists 3 founders | D | Founder interview. The three founders named on the company's About page are Paul Richards (CEO), Igor Gligorevic (CTO) and Sankari Nair (COO). | [1, 4] |
| First outside money, November 2022 | US$120,000 on a SAFE | D | Founder interview. A SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) is money given now for shares at a later funding round. The company's December 2024 announcement names the first investor as Splash Capital, but not the amount. | [1, 2] |
| Hacker News post that led to the money, 1 November 2022 | 493 points | C | Hacker News record read through the Algolia API. The founder wrote that he faced the question of whether to continue the project. | [5] |
| Pre-seed round, December 2024 | US$1.5 million, led by Jason Calacanis | C | Company announcement of 3 December 2024, repeated by Silicon Canals the same day. Blockchain Founders Capital, Rocket Capital and two angels also invested. No revenue or headcount was given. | [2, 3] |
| Accelerator | LAUNCH Accelerator, cohort 31, public demo day on 17 June 2024 | C | This Week in Startups episode page lists Recall first, presented by Sankari Nair. The company says it was voted top startup in its cohort. | [6, 2] |
| Users claimed, October 2026 | more than 700,000 | D | Company's About and pricing pages. Users, not paying customers. | [4, 7] |
| Team in 2025 | "small, remote, international", from the Netherlands, Serbia, South Africa and Pakistan | C | Founder's hiring posts on Hacker News, January, May and June 2025. No headcount given. | [8] |
| Signups from the first Product Hunt launch | a couple thousand, with poor retention | D | Founder interview. A Product Hunt launch that came 2nd product of the day brought about the first 20 paying users. | [1] |
| Time from first public post to the October 2023 figure | 16 months | calc | Calculated: June 2022 to October 2023. | [1, 5] |
How to read this table: grade D means one statement on one date that nobody else has checked. Grade C is a company statement repeated by a second source, or a public record such as a Hacker News post. A "calc" value (grade X) was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.
| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 | 0 | 10 AI summaries a month; unlimited saves and notes; API and MCP access |
| Plus | 10 | 12 | unlimited AI summaries, chat, automatic tags and knowledge graph, quizzes |
| Max | 38 | 48 | choice of AI model, bulk actions on up to 100 items, 1:1 onboarding |
Prices are in US dollars per month. Yearly billing saves about 17% on Plus and about 21% on Max. The free plan gives 10 AI summaries a month but unlimited saved items and notes. Paid plans are "unlimited" under a fair-use policy, and students can ask for a 20% discount. The company offers a refund within 30 days.
The timeline
From a side project that almost stopped to a funded company, in about two and a half years. Each entry carries its grade.
- Early 2022DRichards starts experimenting with Recall as a side project while he works full-time as a freelance software developer. [1]
- 7 June 2022CShow HN: "Recall – Your Personal Encyclopedia", 34 points. He replies that it will be freemium: 50 items free, then about US$5 a month as the plan for now. [5]
- 2022DA Product Hunt launch brings a couple thousand signups, but few stay. He parks the project for some months and returns to freelance work. [1]
- 1 November 2022DA new Show HN asks the community whether to continue. 493 points. Within 24 hours an investor writes to him; after one phone call they sign a SAFE for US$120,000. [1, 5]
- Late 2022 to 2023DHe works on Recall full-time, hires Igor Gligorevic from Serbia through an introduction after failed trial projects with freelancers, and makes him co-founder. Watching friends try the product leads to a much simpler onboarding. [1, 2]
- 9 March 2023CShow HN: summarize podcasts and other web content with ChatGPT, through a browser extension. [5]
- 8 June 2023CShow HN: build a personal knowledge graph from content you consume online. He writes that Recall has pivoted to a browser extension. 79 points. [5]
- 19 October 2023DStarter Story interview: about US$9,000 a month in recurring revenue, 10% monthly growth, 3 full-time employees, not yet profitable. [1]
- June 2024CRecall presents first at the LAUNCH Accelerator 31 demo day on 17 June. The company says it was #1 Product of the Month on Product Hunt in June. [6, 2]
- 3 December 2024CThe company announces US$1.5 million in pre-seed money led by Jason Calacanis. Silicon Canals reports it the same day. [2, 3]
- January to June 2025CRichards posts engineer openings on Hacker News for a small remote team from four countries. Stack: React and TypeScript, Python with FastAPI, Google Cloud. [8]
- October 2026DThe product runs at recall.it, with web, iOS, Android and four browser extensions, three plans, and a claim of more than 700,000 users. No new revenue figure. [4, 7]
Why it worked
Four causes, in the order they mattered. Each one is a reusable lesson.
Persistence, then a public question
The first version failed to keep users. Instead of a quiet shutdown, the founder asked Hacker News, with an honest title, whether he should continue. The post reached the top of the site for about 13 hours by his account, and an investor contacted him the same day. The money paid for a full-time co-founder.
Watch users, do not ask them
Feedback forms to users who had left got no answers. He then sat friends in front of the product and was not allowed to explain anything. Most could not finish onboarding. He fixed each place where someone got stuck and repeated with a new person until everyone could create a first summary.
A summary as the first value
The product began as a database of cards with automatic links. Summaries of long videos, podcasts and articles, made possible by the large language models of 2023, gave a new user something useful in the first minute; the knowledge graph and the quizzes keep the content coming back later.
Launch sites and directories
Product Hunt launches brought the first paying users, and listings on AI tool directories, some of them paid, brought many more, by the founder's account. Hacker News brought the money. In 2026 the site also has dozens of comparison pages aimed at search traffic.
How it was built
These details come from the founder's interview, his Hacker News posts and the company's own pages. They are company statements, not checked by anyone else. [1, 5, 8, 7]
- The idea comes from Maltego, where the founder worked on software that maps relationships between pieces of information. Recall applies the same graph idea to one person's saved content.
- The first version in 2022 stored data in the browser's IndexedDB database with a backup on the server.
- In 2025 the stack was React and TypeScript in front, Python with FastAPI on the server, and Google Cloud for hosting.
- The Plus plan picks a model for each task among frontier models, open-source models and Gemini Flash. The Max plan lets the user choose ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or another model.
- Payments run through Stripe, and the company was registered in the United States with Stripe Atlas. The founder uses Semrush for keyword research.
- An early growth test was a bot that posted summaries of trending articles as replies on Twitter; it stopped paying off when the Twitter API price rose.
- The product now offers an API and an MCP server, so other AI tools can read the user's saved knowledge.
Tools named in the sources
Each one opens its page in the Tools tab, with every story that uses it.
The dead that came before
Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised to help people save, organize or digest what they find online. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.
Delicious
The promiseSave, tag and share web links from anywhere.
Why it diedYahoo bought it and let it stand still while people moved to phones. Several later owners could not make it pay.
Kippt
The promiseA good-looking bookmarking tool that would cure information overload, with social sharing.
Why it diedCaught between Pocket and Evernote. The social features did not bring new users.
Xmarks
The promiseSync your bookmarks and tabs across browsers.
Why it diedChrome, Firefox and Safari built the same sync in, for free.
Transpose
The promiseA more flexible Evernote, with templates for personal notes and then for businesses.
Why it diedIt charged for a note tool when people already had one and saw no reason to move.
Wavii
The promiseShort machine-made summaries of the news that matters to you.
Why it diedGoogle bought it for the technology before it found a way to make money; the product ended.
What changed
The five predecessors saved links or condensed news, and each lost to a bigger company that offered the same thing free or to the cost of getting people to switch. Saving was never the hard part; going back to what was saved was, and none of them solved that. Recall's founder describes the same problem: people save content and seldom return to it.
Two things are different. First, a language model can now turn a two-hour video or podcast into a summary in seconds, so the saved item is useful on the day it is saved, not only later. Second, the same models make the links between items and the quiz questions automatically, work that tools like Evernote or Obsidian leave to the user. The risk that killed Xmarks and Kippt is still there: ChatGPT, NotebookLM and the browsers can add similar features, and Recall now sells itself partly as a way to use those models with your own content.
Can one person copy it now?
The method, yes. The funding luck, no.
A viral Hacker News post that produces an investor within a day cannot be planned. The rest can be copied: a tool for your own information problem, real users watched in silence, a summary as the first thing a new user gets, and an early price. The founder named two lessons in his interview: launch earlier and charge earlier.
Where it is still open: Knowledge tools for one profession (lawyers, doctors, researchers) whose saved material is too private or too specialized for a general chatbot.
- 1Build for a problem you have yourself, and show a simple version early on Hacker News and Product Hunt.
- 2When users leave, watch new people use the product without help and fix each place they stop.
- 3Give a useful result in the first minute: for content tools, an AI summary of something the user already wants to read or watch.
- 4Charge early. He kept about 3,000 users free for a long time, and said that charging is the only way to learn whether people will pay.
- 5List the product on AI tool directories and write guides for each use case to bring search traffic.
What to watch
The risks are the mirror image of the causes above.
What is not verified
The headline figure, about US$9,000 a month in recurring revenue, rests on one source: Paul Richards's own interview with Starter Story, published on 19 October 2023. The 3-person team and the US$120,000 first check come from the same interview. There is no TrustMRR profile (a fetch of the profile address returned "Not found" on 24 October 2026), no Latka page, and no later revenue figure from the company, its investors or the press. A reader could look for a Stripe-verified revenue profile, an investor update, or a later interview with a dated figure.
The company grew past the team in the figure
The figure is from a team of 3. Since then Recall raised US$1.5 million (December 2024) and in 2025 posted openings for engineers in what it called a small remote team in four countries. The current headcount is not published, and any later revenue would come from a larger, funded company.
Funded, not bootstrapped
The business ran on outside money from November 2022, and the founder said in October 2023 that it was not yet profitable and that salaries were the largest cost.
Big companies sell similar features
NotebookLM, ChatGPT and Perplexity all summarize and chat with sources. The predecessors on this page lost when bigger companies added their feature for free.
Users are not customers
The 700,000 users that the site claims include the free plan. The company has not said how many pay.
Name confusion
Microsoft Recall, a Windows feature, and Recall.ai, a meeting-recording company, share the name. Recall's own About page spends a section saying it is neither.
Sources
The grade next to each source is the best grade that the source can support. "Read in full" means that the text of the page was downloaded and the numbers were checked in it.
- D Starter Story, 19 October 2023: How My Passion Side Project Became A VC-Backed Startup In Just 24 Hours (interview with Paul Richards)Read in full. A founder interview, not a page marked as an estimate. Source for the monthly revenue, growth, team, the US$120,000 SAFE, the Product Hunt results and the tools.
- C Recall blog, 3 December 2024: From a Hacker News Post to securing $1.5M FundingRead in full. Company announcement. Source for the pre-seed round, the investors, the first investor's name, the founder's background and the June 2024 Product Hunt result.
- C Silicon Canals, 3 December 2024: Amsterdam's Recall bags EUR 1.4M funding, by Vigneshwar RavichandranRead in full. Repeats the funding announcement and quotes the COO. No revenue or headcount.
- C Recall About page, last updated October 2026Read in full. Source for the three founders and their roles, the Amsterdam headquarters, the user claim and the product description.
- C Hacker News posts by Paul Richards (paulrchds), 2022 to 2025Read through the Algolia API (search by author and the item records 31655676, 33425947, 36245557, 40639734, 42308801 and 44881901). Source for the post dates, points, the 2022 price plan and the 2023 pivot.
- C This Week in Startups, 17 June 2024: LAUNCH Accelerator 31 Public Demo DayRead the episode page and show notes. The transcript was not available, so nothing from the pitch itself is used.
- C Recall pricing page, read 24 October 2026Read in full, including the monthly prices in the page's structured data. Source for the pricing table and the models used.
- C Hacker News, Who is hiring threads, January, May and June 2025: Recall job posts by Paul RichardsRead through the Algolia API, with the posts 43967085 and 44180352. Source for the team description and the technology stack.
- C Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startupsLocal export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.