FuzeBox Raises $20M For Online Meetings And Collaboration, Round Led By Index Ventures
Online collaboration company FuzeBox has raised a hefty $20 million in Series A funding.
The company is probably best known for its Fuze Meeting products, allowing customers to run online meetings (complete with HD video) on their computers, tablets, and samrtphones. FuzeBox says its technology is now powering 78,000 meetings per day in 122 countries. Last month, it relaunched its iPhone app (under the name Fuze Join for iPhone), and when I got a demo, I was particularly impressed by the responsiveness and speed.
The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Khosla Ventures and Insight Venture Partners. Index partner Mike Volpi (who held a number of senior roles at Cisco) is joining the FuzeBox board.
As with most venture rounds, FuzeBox plans to spend a lot of the money expanding its workforce — specifically the sales, marketing, and engineering teams. In discussing the funding, CEO Jeff Cavins places a particular emphasis on the marketing side. Thus far, he says FuzeBox has been largely “an unmarketed company,” but that’s about to change.
FuzeBox has a complicated history. It was founded in 1998 as CallWave, and its initial focus was online products for fax and voicemail. The company was traded publicly on NASDAQ, but was it went private again in 2009 and renamed itself FuzeBox. Cavins says the CallWave name is actually coming back, but for a new company that FuzeBox is spinning out. FuzeBox is divesting itself of its patent portfolio (as Cavins puts it, “We don’t want ‘em”), and CallWave will focus on monetizing that portfolio.
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