Virtual Office Resource

Fuze, a cloud videoconferencing provider, has announced that it has acquired online workspace company LiveMinutes.

The company hopes the acquisition will make it easier for teams to collaborate.

"Customers tell us they are frustrated by outdated conferencing tools and the multiplication of the new breed of team messaging apps that create even more fragmented streams of conversations," said Fuze CEO Bobby Yerramilli-Rao. "Distributed teams are the new norm, but many of these new technologies make it harder to collaborate in any kind of meaningful way. Integrating LiveMinutes is our first step in giving teams all the tools they need to stay in touch and collaborate -- in and out of meetings -- on one unified platform, which is something not available with any product today."

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Fuze intends to make immediate use of the acquisition. It’s planning to roll out a new feature called Collaborative Notes in the next year based on LiveMinutes. Collaborative Notes lets distributed teams manage discussions and tasks between meetings.

The combined company’s offerings will include integration with a number of common cloud tools, including Box, Dropbox, Google (News - Alert) Calendar and Google Drive, among others.

LiveMinutes alone already has an impressive roster of clients, including Groupon, Starbucks, Macy’s and Thoughtworks. Fuze also claims over 6.5 million users around the world, with over two million meetings every work day.

"Providing an awesome HD meeting experience as a seamless piece of the LiveMinutes platform was always on our roadmap, but building a globally scalable real-time platform like Fuze is a hard problem to solve," LiveMinutes CEO Kemal El Moujahid said. "With our joint resources, Fuze can now deliver what distributed teams really need - a platform that brings all of their project collaboration together, including what happens in meetings."

Kemal will lead Fuze’s product strategy. LiveMinutes COO will also join Fuze’s leadership team.

Fuze also raised $20 million in capital from Hermes Growth partners.