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Async is a voice messaging platform designed for remote teams – replacing video calls with a personal audio page where colleagues send messages that recipients answer on their own schedule.
ENTRY ANGLES
Async-first communication layer purpose-built for engineering teams with GitHub/Linear integration · Async transparency platforms that make work visible automatically to reduce communication need · Vertical async tools for specific team types (sales with call recordings, design with work-in-progress)
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Deep integrations with team structure tools (Notion, Linear, Slack), Distribution and embedded workflow adoption, Vertical-specific domain expertise for target team type
ASYNC FOUNDER
“book time with me here”
The shift to remote work solved one problem – the daily commute – and created several others: calendars packed with video calls, inboxes in permanent overflow, and a pervasive sense that being online has become indistinguishable from being productive. Async is building a voice messaging platform specifically designed to replace a significant portion of that synchronous load.
The core product is a personal voice messaging page – analogous to a Calendly link for scheduling, but for receiving voice messages instead of booking time. Colleagues and partners who want to reach you send a voice message to your Async page rather than booking a meeting. Async transcribes all incoming voice messages automatically (faster to leave than text, faster to read than to listen), and recipients can respond with voice or text. Responses and comments are pinned to specific timestamps in the original message, with reaction icons visible on the audio timeline.
AI features are rolling out incrementally: smart suggestions for which scheduled meetings could be replaced by an async voice exchange, and auto-generated summaries of longer messages. Typical use cases span status updates to investors, cross-team project check-ins, interview feedback, and internal announcements – any recurring communication format where the value is in the information transferred, not in the simultaneous presence of all participants.
Still in public beta with web and macOS/iOS apps, Async has Notion and Figma among its early users. Custom profile URL slugs are already sold as a paid feature at $19/year. A fuller paid tier, expected to include the AI features, is forthcoming. Async raised $4M in its first round.
What is interesting about a voice messaging tool is less the feature set than the timing. Async communication – where participants don't need to be available simultaneously – has been a concept in software for decades. What changed is the operating environment: remote-first teams now have a structural need for it that on-site teams never did.
In an office, asking a colleague a quick question was frictionless. In a distributed team spanning multiple time zones, that same question triggers a meeting request, which triggers scheduling overhead, which ultimately costs an hour to surface five minutes of information. Instant messaging was supposed to help, but "instant" created its own problem: constant availability expectations that fragment deep work across the day. The pushback against synchronous-by-default communication is now generating its own vocabulary and a growing set of products.
Async's ASAP reframe – from "as soon as possible" to "as soon as preferable" – captures the shift concisely. The parallel to Calendly is also structurally apt: Calendly succeeded by making it socially acceptable to say "book time with me here" instead of exchanging six emails. Async is attempting the same normalization for voice messages as a meeting substitute.
The companies in this space are thinking about async in different ways. Async reduces the need for meetings. Spinach helps teams run faster standups. Produce8 surfaces team activity automatically so status meetings become redundant. Assembly collects structured workflow updates without a synchronous call. Each of these is a different point of entry into the same underlying shift.
The opportunity is building infrastructure for async-first distributed teams – and the category is broader than voice messaging.
Async communication platforms (reducing synchronous load) and async transparency platforms (reducing the need for communication altogether by making work visible automatically) are both growing in parallel. Among the platforms already reviewed here: Spinach ($6M raised), Produce8 ($6M Canadian), and Assembly ($14.5M raised). Each found a specific workflow to make asynchronous; none has attempted to solve the whole problem.
The most defensible positions in this category will likely be vertical: an async-first communication layer purpose-built for a specific type of team (engineering teams with natural GitHub/Linear integration, sales teams where call recordings already exist, design teams where work-in-progress is visual). Generic async tools face the same commoditization pressure as generic project management tools.
For founders looking at this space, the honest constraint is distribution, not product. The winning async tool will be the one that gets embedded in enough team workflows that switching out becomes friction – which means early partnerships with team structure tools (Notion, Linear, Slack) matter more than feature differentiation at the outset.