Billion Dollar Unicorns: Zoom Video Communications Enters the Club
Summary
In 2011, he quit Cisco to start his own company that would create a new video service on top of modern cloud architecture. Zoom unifies cloud video conferencing, simple online meetings, group messaging, and a software-defined conference room solution into one easy-to-use platform. Zoom’s market penetration is strongest among tech companies, but it also claims to work with 88% of the top 200 universities. In January this year, it raised $100 million from Sequoia Capital in a Series D round that valued it at $1 billion. Apart from legacy vendors Cisco and Polycom, Zoom competes in a crowded market for enterprise web-conferencing services where you do not just have startups like Highfive, Join.Me, Vidyo Inc., and BlueJeans Network Inc. but also larger players like Adobe, Citrix, and Microsoft.