Zenzap, a startup building a private messaging app with artificial intelligence built in, has raised $44 million from investors including Bessemer, Lightspeed, and The Garage. The company is pitching its product as a workplace alternative to the consumer chat apps many employers already use.
Plenty of businesses coordinate with staff over WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or iMessage, and they use those apps to exchange documents and data. Zenzap founder Guy Weiss wants to change that. His product aims to let companies talk to their workers and give those workers access to the organization’s context, all while staying within IT and security rules.
Individual investors include Wix president Nir Zohar and Yoram Tietz, a former general manager at EY. The round is notable because Weiss is raising money for the first time in his career.
Weiss has founded companies before. In 2012 he bootstrapped StuccoMedia, an e-commerce marketing platform, and sold it to Market Group in 2015. He then spent a few years as an investor. In 2022 he founded Zenzap after meeting Bessemer partner Adam Fisher and batting around ideas. His current co-founders are Noam Neumann and Jonatan Bien.
Weiss said he started the app on his own money and worked out of Bessemer’s office. He was reluctant to take outside capital, he said, because of what he had already built.
“I didn’t want to raise capital. The only thing I had to lose was my name, and I was super afraid to do a second round as a founder and become a failure, because my first round was very successful. I didn’t need to work for money. So, when I met Adam, I actually started my idea with my own capital,” he told TechCrunch.
Weiss said Fisher persuaded him that Zenzap should be a venture-backed business, since scaling would take more capital. The company is designed for a wide range of employers, from hospitality and construction to healthcare and fast food.
Weiss was blunt about the competition. “You can’t use WhatsApp or iMessage within a workplace with the AI agent on top of it because it doesn’t comply with IT. So that’s off the table. You can’t implement Slack and Microsoft Teams because they were not built for this day-to-day use case for mobile-first that is meant for average users,” he said.
The free tier includes group chats, direct messages, task management, calendar integration, schedule management, AI-powered voice chat, and AI search. Organizations can pay for plans starting at $51 per month for up to 20 users. Paid plans add voice and video calls, smart task sorting, task templates, higher file storage limits, AI search across the workspace, and the ability to turn messages into tasks.
Zenzap also sells AI agents that automate workflows, along with AI-assisted transcriptions of voice notes and calls. Those features run on a credit-based pricing system.
The company lists FedEx, Dollar General, Taco Bell, Starbucks, Casey’s, and Regal among its clients. Weiss said branches of fast-food chains such as IHOP and McDonald’s use the platform to organize shifts and discuss supply.
“Each vertical has its own use case and workflows, which they self-serve with AI, but they all share something in common,” Weiss said.
Zenzap has 50 employees across the U.S., Tel Aviv, and Europe. It plans to hire in its product and research and development departments.
Fisher said the company’s broad focus could work in its favor. He noted that Bessemer uses the messenger within its own investment team to discuss and manage deals, which he said shows the product can serve different kinds of users.
“The only work platform with any allegiance is Slack, and that’s almost entirely among the developer community. Zenzap is not focused on developers, but on the other 99% of employees using personal messaging apps and waiting for an agent of their own. People desperately want a clear separation of work from their personal lives, and the adoption of personal and work agents makes it imperative that separation happen now,” Fisher said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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