Former Yext CEO Howard Lerman is reported to have raised more than $30 million in Series A funding to launch a new workplace app that allows employees to hold meetings in a less formal and more efficient manner.
The aforementioned virtual office software is called Roam, and it could be another virtual office workspace to revolutionize remote work, as employees have taken a liking to working from their homes.
Since the pandemic hampered face-to-face interactions, telecommunicating has established itself as a workplace standard, and Zoom has dominated this niche. In North and Latin America, Teamstage statistics show that during the third quarter of 2021, the platform recorded 20.93 million downloads of the Zoom app.
Zoom entered the public conscience during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, but despite these figures, the video conferencing system is still not perfect.
According to CNBC, Lerman was motivated to find Roam after unintentionally leaving out one of his coworkers from an important Zoom call. He then came to the conclusion that there was no way for an outsider to know when people were meeting, so he made the decision to develop a platform that increases employee visibility.
About Roam
The budding platform hails itself as an all-in-one Cloud HQ for distributed companies. Looking at early platform snapshots from other news sources, Roam appears to be a virtual office building where people can know who everyone else is interacting with at the moment. This is because employees can appear in virtual rooms and visit with the click of a button - allowing them to roam.
It could be compared to a Roblox world, but with not much of interactive sprites. In a Roam cloud HQ, the whole company can be together without being in a meeting, says founder Howard Lerman.
As stated in a Roam blog post, the platform has been piloting with a dozen companies for a couple of months and has already yielded significantly positive results. As per Lerman, the use of Roam reduced daily meeting durations from 4.5 hours per day to less than 2.6 hours per day, a 42% decrease. This is definitely an excellent way to increase the productivity of a company.
"Sometimes I feel like I'm operating on fast-forward. It's not just me. Across Roam - the average meeting time is just 8 minutes and 34 seconds," Lerman advertises how Roam can turn hours of meeting time into minutes.
What's Next?
The same blog post reveals that Lerman and Jules Maltz at IVP raised $30 million in Series A funding together. Roam's fundraising total increased to $40.6 million thanks to his additional $10.6 million personal contribution.
Earlier today, the platform's beta version was made available. The business claims that the product is ready for a public release, but they want to scale slowly to guarantee a positive user experience for everyone who tries it. Through this link, interested beta testers can request an invitation.
