Owl Labs.

Every hybrid meeting has two rooms. There is the one with people in it - coffee cups, side conversations, a whiteboard - and there is the little grid of faces on a screen who can barely tell who just spoke. Owl Labs built an entire company around closing the distance between those two rooms.

Founded in 2014 by robotics engineers Max Makeev and Mark Schnittman, the company's origin is refreshingly unglamorous. Both had worked at iRobot, the maker of the Roomba. To test whether a single camera could follow a conversation as it moved around a table, they put a laptop on a spinning bar stool and watched. It worked. That experiment became the Meeting Owl, a 360-degree camera, microphone, and speaker that automatically pans and zooms to whoever is talking.

The device is named and shaped like an owl for a reason: owls turn their heads to see in every direction, which is precisely what the camera does. The first Meeting Owl shipped in June 2017. Nearly a decade later, Owl Labs devices are used by roughly 250,000 organizations, including 92 of the Fortune 100.

Instead of a fixed webcam bolted to a monitor, the Meeting Owl sits in the middle of a conference table and captures the full 360 degrees around it. Its software - the Owl Intelligence System - identifies who is speaking and highlights them for remote participants, so a video call stops being a static shot of a distant table and becomes a live, following view of the conversation.

The customers are the people who buy and manage meeting rooms: IT and workplace teams at enterprises, small and midsize businesses, and schools. Owl Labs sells across all three, from a single classroom to a Fortune 100 boardroom. The problem it solves is the same everywhere - remote participants who feel like second-class attendees because the room's equipment was never built with them in mind.

Rivals such as Logitech, Poly, Cisco, Neat, and Jabra largely sell modular meeting-room systems - a separate camera, a separate microphone bar, a separate speaker, wired into a controller. Owl Labs took the opposite bet: one round device you set on the table and plug in. The 360-degree lens and integrated mics mean there is nothing to aim and little to install, which lowers the bar for the IT team deploying it.

The business model is straightforward hardware, sold direct through owllabs.com and through resellers like CDW, Insight, and Amazon, with attached software for device fleet management. When Microsoft certified the entire Owl Labs product line for Teams, it was less a headline than a trust signal to enterprise buyers who have been burned by gear that only mostly works.

Owl Labs sits in the meeting-room hardware market, but its expertise reaches beyond the device. Since 2016 it has published an annual State of Hybrid Work report, now in its ninth year - a survey widely quoted by journalists and executives trying to make sense of where and when people work. In doing so, a company that sells cameras became a reference point for the future of work itself.

The 2025 edition found that the frontier of flexibility has shifted from where people work to when, and that 51% of employees wish an AI avatar could sit in on meetings for them - a finding that reads as much as a warning about meeting fatigue as a product opportunity. That is the company's real position in the market: not just selling the tool for hybrid meetings, but shaping the argument for why they need to be better.