Toronto-based Zoom.AI has raised a $3.1 million seed extension, led by Evolution Equity Partners with existing investors Betaworks, BDC, Good News Ventures, Two Small Fish Ventures, and North Spring Capital.
The extension follows the initial seed round in early June 2017 and brings the total seed investment to $5.2 million. The company plans to use the funding to invest in its product development and expand its sales in the US and Europe.
“This seed extension financing round will enable us to grow our team to meet demand and expand our presence in both the European and the US markets.”
– Roy Pereira
“Zoom.ai is leading a new approach to tackling the complexity of the modern workplace,” said Roy Pereira, CEO and founder of Zoom.ai. “Enterprises are seeking new ways to engage and empower their employees — Zoom.ai brings secure, intelligent automation to the workplace and enables enterprises and employees to cut down on time spend on menial task and focus in on work that drives business. This seed extension financing round will enable us to grow our team to meet demand and expand our presence in both the European and the US markets. Partnering with Evolution Equity Partners will help us emphasize our commitment to enterprise security.”
Zoom.ai, which offers an AI assistant for employees in the enterprise to automate tasks like meeting scheduling, flight searches, internal document searches, and reminders, raised a $2.1 million seed round in June 2017 from Extreme Venture Partners, BetaWorks, MaRS IaF, BDC, and the Golden Triangle Angel Network. At the time, Pereira stressed the potential of the company thanks to its ability to integrate into existing chat and tech stacks.
“We want to be like the Salesforce of our generation,” said Pereira. “Salesforce started with a new UI, the browser back in 2000 — they were like, ‘stop installing on a CD-Rom.’ We’re saying the same thing, stop installing another app, don’t give another app to your employees with another login with another UI. Chat is a singular UI that we all understand; there’s no training involved. So we want to be that next UI within the enterprise.”
The assistant is now integrated into Microsoft Teams and Google’s G Suite after the company recently made strategic partnerships.
“Zoom.ai is uniquely placed to extend its category leadership position internationally and across Enterprise sectors by revolutionizing how corporate work is done and their data is managed,” said Dennis Smith, founder and managing partner at Evolution. “Zoom.ai has built-in from the ground up often neglected attributes that an enterprise ready solution needs – security of data, cross-platform reach, the innate ability to not only dive into much of an enterprise’s high value data applications and knowledge storage but also to increasingly apply machine learning to stitch together, amplify insights and to present disparate corporate information through chat as a common and easily understood interface.”
Smith will join the Zoom.ai board of directors.