Zoom snaps up Seattle startup Common Room to bolster AI-powered sales tools

Common Room, the fast-rising Seattle startup that built an AI-powered platform to help sales and marketing teams track buying signals across their customers, is being acquired by Zoom.

Terms of the deal were not revealed in a news release on Thursday.

“When we founded Common Room in 2020, we set out with a simple vision: to transform how organizations connect with people,” Common Room co-founder and CEO Linda Lian wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Over the past six years, we’ve had the privilege of building alongside our customers through one of the biggest shifts in enterprise software, the rise of AI.”

Zoom said the acquisition will extend its Zoom Revenue Accelerator platform “upstream,” pairing Common Room’s buyer intelligence with the conversation data Zoom already captures from sales calls — giving reps insight into which accounts are in-market and why to reach out before a call even happens.

“Revenue teams will now have a single, unified platform that will help them reach the right person at the right moment with the right message at every stage of a deal, cutting busywork,” Abhisht Arora, Zoom’s chief strategy officer, said in a blog post.  

Common Room emerged from stealth in 2021 with $52 million in funding from investors including Index Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Next Play Ventures, Greylock, 01 Advisors and a bevy of angel investors — Etsy CEO Josh Silverman; former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo; and former Axiom CEO Elena Donio.

Early customers included Notion and Pulumi, and the roster has grown to include enterprises large and small.

Lian, a former associate at Madrona Venture Group and senior product marketing manager at Amazon Web Services, co-founded the company alongside three other Seattle tech vets: CTO Viraj Mody, a former engineering director at Dropbox and technical advisor to the CEO at Convoy; chief architect Tom Kleinpeter, previously a principal engineer at Dropbox; and design chief Francis Luu, who spent 10 years at Facebook.

Common Room was the 2022 GeekWire Awards Startup of the Year and is No. 80 on the GeekWire 200, our ranked index of Pacific Northwest startups.

Zoom, the San Jose, Calif.-based company best known for its video conferencing platform, has expanded in recent years into AI-powered tools for sales, customer service and workplace collaboration. The publicly traded company reported nearly $4.9 billion in revenue over the past 12 months and has a market capitalization of roughly $25 billion.

“Joining Zoom connects our graph to the conversations sellers have every day where deals are actually won and to the AI that can act on it,” Lian said in a statement. “With Zoom’s scale, resources, and global reach, we’ll be able to accelerate our roadmap while continuing to serve and innovate for our customers.”

Source link