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Fuze Acquires Team Collaboration Platform LiveMinutes; Raises $20M from Hermes Growth PartnersSAN FRANCISCO, May 20, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Fuze, the cloud video conferencing company reinventing how distributed teams work, today announced the acquisition of LiveMinutes, an online team workspace platform, as well as $20 million in additional funding from Hermes Growth Partners. With LiveMinutes, Fuze will expand its platform to include a persistent project workspace for distributed teams to stay connected, create and share content, meet together live and maintain context across the lifecycle of a project. More than 100,000 companies use Fuze today to make meetings more meaningful, including Groupon, Starbucks, Macy's.com and Thoughtworks. Fuze helps distributed teams work across distances through HD-quality voice and video conferencing and content sharing across devices, desktops and meeting rooms. The acquisition of LiveMinutes will advance Fuze's mission to create the ultimate collaborative workspace for teams -- one that connects the ongoing conversations, content and context around projects, including meetings. Building on Accelerating Momentum
"Customers tell us they are frustrated by outdated conferencing tools and the multiplication of the new breed of team messaging apps that create even more fragmented streams of conversations," said Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, Fuze CEO. "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 i 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." "Currently the processes that occur before, during and after meetings are not very connected or collaborative. Tasks such as organizing the content, the participants, the agenda, the notes and the follow-ups occur across a variety of tools with very little context," says Alan Lepofsky, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research. "Customers are looking for ways to seamlessly bring together communication, collaboration and conferencing to enable people to work effectively together." Making Virtual Meetings More Productive The two companies combined already integrate with commonly used applications including Box, Dropbox, Google Calendar, Google Drive and others, ensuring teams can collaborate in real-time in one space-- rather than multiple channels-- without giving up what already works. The LiveMinutes co-founders, Kemal El Moujahid (CEO) and Alexis Dufetel (COO), have joined the Fuze leadership team and Kemal will now lead product strategy for Fuze. "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," says Kemal. "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." More information on the integration of Fuze and LiveMinutes can be found here. About LiveMinutes About Fuze
To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fuze-acquires-team-collaboration-platform-liveminutes-raises-20m-from-hermes-growth-partners-300086138.html SOURCE Fuze |