Many companies around the world are using consumer-oriented chat applications, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or iMessage, to communicate with employees, coordinate work, and exchange files or data.
Guy Weiss is building Zenzap. This is a private communication tool with AI functionality, aimed at facilitating communication between companies and their employees. It also provides employees with context information about their organization, all while complying with IT and security regulations.
The company has raised $44 million in funding, with investors including Bessemer, Lightspeed, and The Garage. Additionally, individual investors such as Nir Zohar, the president of Wix, and former general manager of Ernst & Young, Yoram Tietz, have also participated.
What makes this round of financing particularly noteworthy is that it marks the first time in Weiss's career that he has raised funds. In 2012, he founded an e-commerce marketing platform called StuccoMedia with his own funds and sold it to Market Group in 2015. After that, he worked as an investor for a few years. In 2022, after getting to know Bessemer and their partner Adam Fisher, Weiss began to develop different ideas together with his current co-founders Noam Neumann and Jonatan Bien, and ultimately they founded Zenzap.
Weiss indicates that he initially launched this application with his own funds and works from an office located at Bessemer.
He said about TechCrunch: “At that time, I didn’t want to raise funds. The only thing I could lose was my reputation, and I was very afraid of becoming a failure again as a founder with a second company, especially since my first company was so successful. I didn’t need to work for money. So, when I encountered Adam, I actually used my own funds to start this project.”
Weiss said that Fisher convinced him that Zenzap should become a company supported by venture capital, because the company needs funds to expand its scale.
He said that the initial idea was to create a messaging app aimed at a wide range of businesses, covering industries such as hotels, construction, healthcare, and fast food.
Weiss said, "You cannot use WhatsApp or iMessage in a work scenario, and then overlay AI proxy on top of it, because this does not comply with IT specifications. So that approach won't work. You also cannot deploy Slack and Microsoft Teams, because they are not designed for this kind of daily usage scenario that prioritizes mobile devices and is aimed at ordinary users."
The free version of Zenzap provides common chat functions, including group chats and private messages, task management, calendar integration, shift scheduling management, as well as voice chat and search powered by AI. Enterprises can opt for a paid subscription starting from $51 per month, which supports up to 20 users and unlocks features such as voice and video calls, intelligent task classification, task templates, and a higher file storage limit. The paid version also allows users to use AI search throughout the workspace and convert messages into tasks.
The company also provides AI agents for workflow automation, as well as AI assisted voice memos and call transcription features. These features adopt a points-based pricing system.
Currently, the customers listed by Zenzap include FedEx, Dollar General, Taco Bell, Starbucks, Casey, and Regal. Weiss added that some stores of fast-food chains such as IHOP and McDonald often coordinate shift schedules and discuss supply issues on their platform.
This startup currently has 50 employees in the United States, Tel Aviv, and Europe. In the short term, the company hopes to continue hiring in its product and R&D departments.
The Fisher of Bessemer indicates that Zenzap focuses on serving a wide range of people, which could become its advantage. He mentioned that even this venture capital firm itself uses this communication tool within its investment team to discuss and manage project processes, indicating that it can serve different types of users.
In an email statement sent to TechCrunch, he stated: "The only work platform that truly possesses user loyalty is Slack, and this loyalty is almost entirely concentrated within the developer community. Zenzap is not focused on developers; instead, it is aimed at the other 99% of employees – those who use personal messaging apps and are waiting for their own agents. There is a strong desire to clearly separate work from personal life, and the widespread adoption of personal agents and work agents makes it imperative that this separation happen now."
