Networking News
Norwegian Startup Neat Aims To Take Zoom, Microsoft Teams Meetings ‘To The Next Level’
Joseph F. Kovar
‘We really started this company to take this industry to the next level and really deliver the best experience with Zoom. So we really worked very closely with Zoom on the engineering side, the product development side, as well as the market side, to deliver on that,’ says Neat CEO Simen Teigre.
Who are your investors?
The two lead investors are Fredrik Halvorsen, the former CEO of Tandberg, a pioneer in video conferencing, and [Tandberg’s former Executive Vice President of Products] O.J. Winge. He was at Tandberg, running the product side, and also was a Cisco senior vice president for collaboration back in the day. So these two guys are the lead investors. And then we also have Zoom as an investor, and they made an investment in a couple of rounds. They made the first investment as we launched in October 2019 with them. And then of course, employees and the co-founders, myself included.
How important was that investment from Zoom?
That’s been very important for us from a strategic perspective. It’s a minority state, and we wanted to bring them in as an investor because it shows our joint commitment as partners to work together. So that’s why it was important for us to have that with our launch in October 2019. It was also important for Eric [Yuan, Zoom CEO] and the Zoom team to show their commitment to us as a new player and a new partner. Like I said, we really started this company to take this industry to the next level and really deliver the best experience with Zoom. So we really worked very closely with Zoom on the engineering side, the product development side, as well as the market side, to deliver on that.
You mentioned that you’ve just recently signed an agreement with Microsoft on Teams as well to provide integration with Neat. Did the fact that Zoom is a big competitor to Teams impact the decision to partner with Teams?
I would say that it’s basically a result of listening to our customers. As a small company, it’s important to focus, and we wanted to start off with Zoom, and we had a very close relationship. And we still do. But we’ve been asked over and over again by customers to also support Microsoft Teams, which is the other big player in this market. So from our perspective, it’s really important to listen to our customers and deliver Neat to any customer, depending on whether they have Zoom or Teams. And this is the same strategy that Zoom has. They have an ecosystem of partners, and they’re working with many other partners in the industry.
