In November 2012, the company signed Stanford University as its first customer. In September 2012, Zoom launched a beta version that could host conferences with up to 15 video participants. In May 2012, the company changed its name to Zoom, influenced by Thacher Hurd's children's book Zoom City. In June 2011, the company raised $3 million of seed money from WebEx founder Subrah Iyar, former Cisco SVP and General Counsel Dan Scheinman, and venture capitalists Matt Ocko, TSVC, and Bill Tai. The company had trouble finding investors because many people thought the videotelephony market was already saturated. He left Cisco in April 2011 with 40 engineers to start a new company, originally named Saasbee, Inc. Zoom was founded by Eric Yuan, a former corporate vice president for Cisco Webex. Its software products have faced public and media scrutiny related to security and privacy issues, though the company has taken measures to address these issues. īeginning in early 2020, Zoom's software usage saw a remarkable global increase after quarantine measures were adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company joined the NASDAQ-100 stock index on April 30, 2020.

The company first became profitable in 2019, and completed an initial public offering that year. Zoom's revenue growth, and perceived ease-of-use and reliability of its software, resulted in a $1 billion valuation in 2017, making it a ' unicorn' company. Įric Yuan, a former Cisco engineer and executive, founded Zoom in 2011, and launched its software in 2013. It provides videotelephony and online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform used for video communications (Meetings), messaging (Chat), voice calls (Phone), conference rooms for video meetings (Rooms), virtual events (Events) and contact centers (Contact Center), and offers an open platform allowing third-party developers to build custom applications on its unified communications platform (Developer Platform). (commonly shortened to Zoom, and stylized as zoom) is an American communications technology company headquartered in San Jose, California.

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