Lime bought the transcript layer

Yesterday morning, 6 November, Lime Technologies announced it had bought 51 per cent of Supercompany AS, a two-year-old Oslo company whose only product is Trale, an AI meeting notetaker. Same day completion, paid out of Lime's own cash, with a clause that matters more than the percentage: Lime holds the right to buy the remaining shares in 2029. The press release calls Supercompany 'an independent company'. It is independent the way a flat you rent with a purchase option is yours.

Trale launched in early 2025 and, per the release, has about NOK 7.5 million in recurring software revenue — roughly €640,000 — from more than 200 European companies. Norwegian outlet Shifter adds the detail the press release left out: the company got there profitable, with no outside capital, growing by about a million kroner a month. Two founders bootstrapped a working product for two years and then sold half of it anyway. That is worth a second look, because companies in that position usually hold out.

I went through the product pages today. Trale is not a bot that joins your call — or not only that. It offers a botless desktop recorder, and for in-person meetings you put a phone on the table. It transcribes and summarises in 104 languages, briefs you on who is in the room before the call, turns to-dos into tasks with owners and deadlines, and drafts the follow-up email when the call ends. Data stays in the EU and EEA; penetration testing is by Telenor Cyber Defence, on SOC 2 Type II infrastructure. It also ships an MCP server, so you can ask Claude or ChatGPT about your own meetings — another entry in the MCP thread this notebook keeps logging, after Paddle trimmed its tool list last month and eM Client 11 added read access in October.

The pricing page is honest in the small ways I keep a tally of. Standard is $29 per seat per month billed annually, Business $39, Enterprise custom, trial is seven days and cardless. Unlimited recording and the MCP server sit on the cheapest tier — the connector is not an enterprise upsell. Two quirks worth noting. The currency is USD, not kroner or euro, which is a choice for a company whose customers are 'the Nordics and Europe'. And the Enterprise column lists, between SSO and white labelling, the CEO's direct phone number. I have never seen a phone number sold as a feature line. I respect it.

Here is the part the announcement states plainly and nobody will read twice: 'What matters most in an organisation is often said in meetings and conversations, but rarely makes it into the systems.' That is the entire thesis of the deal. A CRM is a database of what someone bothered to write down — the call logged, the email filed, the opportunity updated on Friday at five. The meeting itself, the hour where the customer actually says what they want, has always happened outside the record. Lime did not build a notetaker to fix that. It bought one, already integrated, and renamed it Lime Meeting Assist for its six markets: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands. For everyone else, Trale keeps its own name. The dual brand is the tell — Lime knows most people who want their meetings remembered will never run its CRM.

So what did a profitable bootstrapped team take? Distribution, by its own account: 35 years of CRM sales and 'established relationships with thousands of companies', as co-founder Samuel Nuri puts it. And what did Lime take? The transcript layer — the missing file in its own database, delivered by a team that proved the product sells without marketing money. The 2029 call option is the part to watch. If Meeting Assist lands, Lime exercises it and the 'independent company' becomes a feature. If it does not, Supercompany keeps selling Trale to people who use Salesforce anyway.

Sources, all read 7 November 2026: Lime's investor announcement for the 51 per cent, the ARR, the dual-brand plan and the 2029 option; Dealroom for the deal summary; Shifter for the bootstrapped-and-profitable detail; and trale.ai for the product, security and pricing facts quoted above. Neither Trale nor Lime is in our directory. The customer and revenue figures are the buyer's own release.