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With the coronavirus pandemic hitting the whole world at large, face-to-face business activities had to take a plunge. That’s when this company became a saviour for every online meeting that took place. We are talking about the Zoom cloud meeting which was founded by Eric S. Yuan in 2011.
Zoom is an American company offering remote conferencing services. It is headquartered in San Jose, California. It primarily provides a remote conferencing service that combines other tertiary services like video conferencing, online meetings, chat, and mobile collaboration to facilitate conducting business virtually. Read on to know more about the Zoom success story below.
Zoom - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | Zoom |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | San Jose, California, United States |
| Industry | Video Communication and Conferencing |
| Founder | Eric Yuan |
| Founded | 2011 |
| Parent Organization | Zoom Video Communications, Inc. |
| Website | zoom.us |
| Contact | info@zoom.us |
Zoom - Latest News
About Zoom and How it Works
Zoom - Impact of COVID19
Zoom - Founder and Team
Zoom - Startup Launch
Zoom - Mergers and Acquisitions
Zoom - Funding and Investors
Zoom - Valuation
Zoom - Competitors
FAQs
Zoom - Latest News
June 30, 2021 - Zoom has successfully acquired Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions (KITES), which will bring in the knowledge of Machine Learning-powered language translation, and is aimed at the eradication of language barriers on the app in the future.
June 23, 2021- Zoom rolls out a new feature update with Zoom 5.7.0 version where the app will suggest pronouns for the users to choose them according to their preference. This step will be a huge help in the identification of the gender binary and especially for the members of the LGBTQ community who are using the platform.
About Zoom and How it Works
Zoom Cloud meetings offer a free video-conferencing facility for up to 100 participants. It offers a communications platform that connects people through video, voice, chat, and content sharing. Originally, it came with a 40-minute time limit but now due to coronavirus lockdown, this limit has been removed. If the companies want to add more participants and avail more advanced features, paid subscriptions are available with Zoom. Zoom's closed source software is claimed to be compliant with FedRAMP, HIPAA, PIPEDA and PHIPA, and the GDPR.
Initially, when Zoom was launched, it could host video conferences with 15 participants which increased to 25, two years after its inception. From there, it directly jumped to a participation limit of 100 in 2015 followed by 1000 for business customers.
The company has an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars across mobile devices, desktops, telephones, and room systems.
Zoom's mission has created a people-centric cloud service that transforms the real-time collaboration experience and improves the quality and effectiveness of communications.
Zoom - Impact of COVID19
COVID-19 really boosted the success story of Zoom. We've outlined it's impact below!
- With the pandemic intensifying, lockdowns were announced in almost all the affected countries which took Zoom to an altogether new level.
- Be it companies, schools, or colleges, all started using Zoom Video Communications to conduct business meetings and deliver lectures.
- Zoom also offered its services to K–12 schools free of charge in many countries.
- Zoom also released a paid education plan which allows unlimited meetings for up to 300 people. Not just that, these meetings are graced with the options of recording, transcription, and various other administrative controls.
- These activities contributed to a sharp rise in Zoom usage. For example, in just a day, the Zoom application was downloaded 3,43,000 times.
- The company gained over 2.22 million users in the initial months of 2020. This number exceeded the users they Zoom had amassed entirely in 2019.
- Consequently, by March 2020, the Zoom share price increased to US$160.98 per share. This drafted an increase of about 263% as compared to its initial share prices when it came out with an IPO.
- Zoom also became the go-to social platform for the Millennial. During this pandemic when they couldn’t step out, they used Zoom for blind dates and recess and many more fun activities that could turn their boredom into delight.
- The founder, Yuan, added $20 Million to his net worth in just one day. This took his total net worth to $5.6 Billion!
Zoom - Founder and Team
The Founder of Zoom is Eric S. Yuan.
He has a bachelor's and master's degrees in applied mathematics and computer science from the Shandong University of Science and Technology. Yuan was working with WebEx, which was acquired by Cisco Systems and that’s when he became vice president of engineering. After that, he went on to launch Zoom Video Communications.
Zoom - Startup Launch
Within just one year of inception, Zoom recorded participation of 1 million user base. In its first year, Zoom established partnerships with multiple B2B collaboration software providers which included Redbooth (then Teambox), and together created a program that was named "Works with Zoom". This, in turn, worked for Zoom in establishing more superior partnerships with hardware and software vendors like Logitech, Vaddio, and InFocus.
Zoom had already reached 10 million users by 2014. And this number skyrocketed in 2015 when it went on to 40 million individuals with 65,000 organizations subscribed to the Zoom Video Conferencing Services. By 2015, Zoom had already hosted a total of 1 billion meeting minutes since its inception.
Zoom hosted Zoomtopia 2017 in the year that was Zoom's first-ever annual user conference. During this conference, they announced a dynamic series of new products and partnerships, which also included Zoom's Partnership with Meta. This partnership was envisioned to integrate Zoom with Augmented Reality, more popularly known as AR. Also, Zoom announced its native support for Skype for Business and its futile integration with Slack, Workplace by Facebook, and its initial steps towards artificial intelligence (AI) speech-to-text converter.
Varad Kitey
Zoom - Mergers and Acquisitions
- In 2015, Zoom announced the integration of Zoom video conferencing with a Salesforce's customer relationship management platform. This collaboration allowed the sales team to initiate such conferences with their sales leads without leaving the application.
- In 2017, Zoom went on to launch Telehealth. This platform is a scalable product in the telehealth category which allows the doctors to remotely visit their patients through video communications for consultation.
- In 2017, Zoom Video Communications announced a partnership with Polycom. This partnership integrated Zoom's video meetings into the partnered company, Polycom's conferencing systems and enabled a wide array of features that included multiple screens and device meetings, HD and wireless screen sharing, and calendar integration with Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and iCal.
- In March 2020, NextTech AR Solutions acquired a software company named Jolokia. Through this acquisition, it intends to integrate Zoom into Jolokia's Inferno platform. The highlight is that this integration will allow Zoom Video meetings to support up to 100,000 participants. Not just that, with added and advanced features like “real-time Q&A Plus immersive AR.” and additional features like the ability to start a Zoom meeting from the Inferno platform and the incorporation of closed captioning in 64 languages to meeting recordings.
- Very recently, in May 2020 , Zoom acquired Keybase. Keybase offers end-to-end encrypted chat, file-sharing, and code-hosting all based on a cryptographic platform.
- Zoom has acquired German startup Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions (KITES) on June 30, 2021. The company's acquisition would bring in the knowledge of language translation via machine learning and is deemed to be a step forward to break the language barriers and speed up the work across the organizations the world over.
Yash Gupta
Zoom - Funding and Investors
Zoom has raised a total of $152 Million in funding over 7 rounds. Their latest funding was raised in January 2017 from a Series D round.
Here is a list of all the funding rounds of Zoom:
| Date | Stage | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 2010 | Pre Seed Round | $500K | - |
| June 2011 | Seed Round | $3 million | TEEC Angel Fund, Michael Everett, Matt Ocko |
| January 2013 | Series A | $6 million | Qualcomm Ventures, Jerry Yang |
| September 2013 | Series B | $6.5 million | Horizons Ventures, Jerry Yang, Patrick Soon-Shiong |
| February 2015 | Series C | $30 million | Emergence Capital Partners, Horizons Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures |
| January 2017 | Series D | $100 million | Sequoia Capital, Emergence Capital Partners |
Varad Kitey
Zoom - Valuation
Zoom is registered under the ticker NASDAQ:ZM. Their stock opened with $36.00 in its Apr 18, 2019 IPO. The Zoom valuation is currently at $9.2 billion. It raised a total of $751 million at IPO.
Zoom - Competitors
There are several online video conferencing services available. Some of the competitors of Zoom are Skype, Webex, Google Meet, Hangouts, and Slack.
FAQs
Is Zoom free?
Yes, the basic plan for Zoom free for all with no trial period. It allows for unlimited 1-1 meetings, each meeting can have a duration of 24 hours maximum.
Who is the owner of Zoom?
Eric S. Yuan is the owner of Zoom.
When was Zoom founded?
Zoom was founded in the year 2011 in San Jose, California, United States.
Do I need to download Zoom to join a meeting?
You need to download the Zoom app before joining a Zoom meeting. Otherwise, you will be prompted to download and install Zoom when you click a join link.
Author: Rishabh Rathi
Source : https://startuptalky.com/zoom-success-story/
Date : 2021-06-30T09:51:00.000Z