Zoom was founded by Eric Yuan, a former corporate vice president for Cisco Webex. He left Cisco in April 2011 with 40 engineers to start a new company, originally named Saasbee, Inc. The company had trouble finding investors because many people thought the videotelephony market was already saturated. 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. In May 2012, the company changed its name to Zoom, influenced by Thacher Hurd’s children’s book Zoom City. In September 2012, Zoom launched a beta version that could host conferences with up to 15 video participants. In November 2012, the company signed Stanford University as its first customer. The service was launched in January 2013 after the company raised a $6 million Series A round from Qualcomm Ventures, Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang, WebEx founder Subrah Iyar, and former Cisco SVP and General Counsel Dan Scheinman. Zoom launched version 1.0 of the program allowing the maximum number of participants per conference to be 25. By the end of its first month, Zoom had 400,000 users and by May 2013 it had 1 million users. In July 2013, Zoom established partnerships with B2B collaboration software providers, such as Redbooth (then Teambox), and also created a program named Works with Zoom, which established partnerships with Logitech, Vaddio, and InFocus. In September 2013, the company raised $6.5 million in a Series B round from Horizon Ventures, and existing investors. At that time, it had 3 million users. In April 2020, the app’s CEO, Eric Yuan, announced Zoom’s daily users have ballooned to more than 200 million. On February 4, 2015, the company received US$30 million in Series C funding from investors including Emergence Capital, Horizons Ventures (Li Ka-shing), Qualcomm Ventures, Jerry Yang, and Patrick Soon-Shiong. At that time, Zoom had 40 million users, with 65,000 organizations subscribed and a total of 1 billion meeting minutes since it was established. Over the course of 2015 and 2016, the company integrated its software with Slack, Salesforce, and Skype for Business. With version 2.5 in October 2015, Zoom increased the maximum number of participants allowed per conference to 50 and later to 1,000 for business customers. In November 2015, former president of RingCentral David Berman was named president of the company, and Peter Gassner, the founder and CEO of Veeva Systems, joined Zoom’s board of directors. In January 2017, the company raised US$100 million in Series D funding from Sequoia Capital at a US$1 billion valuation, making it a so-called unicorn. In April 2017, Zoom launched a scalable telehealth product allowing doctors to host remote consultations with patients. In May, Zoom announced integration with Polycom’s conferencing systems, enabling features such as multiple screen and device meetings, HD and wireless screen sharing, and calendar integration with Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and iCal. From September 25–27, 2017, Zoom hosted Zoomtopia 2017, its first annual user conference. At this conference, Zoom announced a partnership with Meta to integrate Zoom with augmented reality, integration with Slack and Workplace by Facebook, and first steps towards an artificial intelligence speech recognition program.