Tech
We got an exclusive look at the pitch deck that viral remote work startup Switchboard used to raise $25 million from investors like Sequoia and Icon Ventures
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- Switchboard is a video meeting startup that lets teams collaborate on other software in real time.
- It went viral on Product Hunt and signed up over 1,200 teams in one week with no marketing budget.
- They’ve just raised a $25 million Series A led by Icon Ventures to take on Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
Switchboard is a new virtual conferencing startup that lets people interact on a shared screen with different software tools all at once. Unlike Zoom and Microsoft Teams, every team member can work with different software tools like Notion, Figma, and Google Drive across a shared screen and work together on large projects while still video conferencing.
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The idea for Switchboard came to founder Amir Ashkenazi in 2020 after he signed up for online guitar lessons during the pandemic and struggled to work with his teacher.
“All I could see was the face of my instructor, and we needed multiple tools to conduct the lesson online,” he said.
Ashkenazi realized that there was a need for a tool that allowed people to work more collaboratively not just for guitar lessons, but for “every time people are trying to do things together, and they’re not physically together,” he said.
As a six-time founder, Ashkenazi was able to jump right into building Switchboard, having been in the startup world for nearly three decades. Some of his past ventures include founding Shopping.com in 1997, which was acquired by eBay in 2005, as well as Adap.tv in 2006, which sold to AOL in 2014.
Ashkenazi started on the Switchboard product in June of 2020 and hired his first remote team. After they had a fully-finished product, they put Switchboard up on the popular tech message board Product Hunt in May. Within a week on the site, they won “Product of the Day” and had over 1,200 teams sign up to use Switchboard for their coworking projects “all with zero marketing budget,” said Ashkenazi.
Switchboard’s word-of-mouth success attracted the attention of the investment team at Icon Ventures, who led Switchboard’s $25 million Series A round in late July, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $38.4 million. Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital and XYZ-Ventures also participated in the Series A round.
The Switchboard team plans to use the new funds to expand their product offerings and continue hiring more team members.
Check out the 12-slide pitch deck Switchboard used to raise its $25 million Series A: