[ad_1]
Switchboard, a collaboration app that combines video conferencing and digital whiteboarding features, announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series A funding, valuing the company at $200 million in post-funding. Icon Ventures led the round with participation from Sequoia, XYZ and Spark Capital, raising Switchboard’s total funding to $38.4 million.
Co-founder and CEO Amir Ashkenazi told TechCrunch that the fresh capital will be used to build the Switchboard team and product.
I founded Switchboard in June 2020, and it really came down to frustration with the remote guitar lessons I was taking. My teacher and I couldn’t bring the tools we needed to the online lesson – like a metronome, PDF viewer and sheet music, a media player for backing tracks, a second camera to view fingerpicking, etc. he said in an email interview. “What I’ve come to realize is that our current ‘collaboration’ tools are just communication tools that allow us to text, voice, video communicate or share screens, but not to do things together. This is a problem not only for my music lessons, but also for remote work around the world, when teams are trying to build products, manage projects or generate new ideas together. What started as a technology for better guitar lessons has evolved into Switchboard: a cloud co-working space purpose-built for remote work.
Ashkenazi was previously president of AOL Platforms before starting Talkee, an AI and voice technology company that acquired LogMe for an undisclosed sum. Ashkenazi is the sole co-founder of Switchboard, whose original team included former Databricks software engineer Chris Jones, Marco Iacono and Daniel Stemmerberg — the latter of whom was a senior product manager at Zoox before it was acquired by Amazon in 2020.
Image Credits: Switch board
Switchboard allows users to run multiple web-based applications in a single “virtual room,” including Google Docs, Figma, Trello, and Jira. Instead of switching between tabs and apps or sharing someone’s screen, Switchboard is designed to bring things into a shared space. For example, users can create permanent public and private sections that keep apps and files open for projects and recurring meetings the next time they’re ready to collaborate. Each class has a “meeting memory” that includes the history of discussion threads and any shared content.
Ashkenazi says that switchboard traffic between a consumer client and the company’s infrastructure is encrypted in flight and at rest. The company does not sell the information it stores and has no plans to do so.
During the pandemic, the market for digital collaboration apps exploded, as more workers moved from offices to work-from-home setups. In the year In 2020, a report from White Star Capital estimated that $35 billion in venture capital funds were invested between 2017 and 2020 in collaboration companies including Postman, WorkVivo, Slack, and Zoom.
“We launched Switchboard during the pandemic to respond to tools that weren’t built for true collaboration,” Ashkenazi said. “It’s not a hard sell… Remote work saved our economy during the pandemic and we’re now seeing it as an option for many workers. [But companies] Some of the limitations of video conferencing include: concerns about sharing a personal desktop, the fatigue of looking at faces all day, and the frustration of having to screen share or re-share what was shared in the meeting via chat.
When asked about the competition, Ashkenazi said he sees Switchboard rivals falling in a few different categories: video conferencing, virtual office and vertical collaboration. But none of them, he argued, would adequately address the challenges the switchboard was designed to overcome.
Image Credits: Switch board
“Virtual conferencing tools like Zoom or Google Meet are great for communication. But they don’t work with any web-based apps, don’t collaborate on any website in real-time, and don’t offer fixed rooms for meetings and projects, or offer a wide space for visual collaboration,” Ashkenazi said. “Meanwhile, vertical collaboration tools like Figma and Miro provide space for visual collaboration and some communication tools, but are applications that are more focused on design and whiteboards.”
Ashkenazi declined to say how many customers or users Switchboard has. But he asserted that the platform is “growing rapidly” and is seeing registrations “from startups to agencies to top tiers.”
“The communication devices and applications we use to do work are so easily connected and the only option we have to connect them is screen sharing. The industry is suffering from too many devices and not enough coordination,” Ashkenazi said. They must seamlessly integrate communication and the applications we use. The challenge is really the nature of the workforce, where video conferencing and screen sharing are so ingrained in our behavior. But most workers realize how inadequate those tools are and want better.
Switchboard currently has 22 employees and plans to increase the number to 36 by the end of the year.
[ad_2]
Source link
