Zoom Preparing for IPO
According to unnamed sources, investment banking and capital markets giant, Morgan Stanley are reportedly ready to take Zoom public. Zoom looks set to be valued at several billion dollars, highlighting both the huge growth and potential in the video conferencing market.
At Zoom’s most recent round of funding in 2017, a $1 billion valuation was quoted. This has since apparently boosted by a $100 million injection from venture capital firm Sequoia. The increase in valuation is significant for the Unified Communications industry as video conferencing adoption continues to see rapid adoption.
Morgan Stanley
Whilst there is still no official word from Morgan Stanley, the connection to Zoom makes a lot of sense. Morgan Stanley position themselves as technology specialists in the investment world and recently hosted a media and telecom conference in Barcelona. Talks included business and digital transformation through innovations like 5G, digital factories and augmented reality.
Whilst the real world use cases for these are immature, the likes of Zoom and video conferencing providers are certainly pushing the agenda, doing more and more with video than has been possible before. The introduction of technologies like 5G and augmented reality can only enhance the video collaboration experience.
Potential to IPO
Eric Yuan, Founder & Chief Executive Office of Zoom, has a rich history of leading success in video providers. Before founding Zoom, Eric was a founding engineer and VP of Engineering at Webex. Here, he grew team from ten engineers to more than eight hundred worldwide and contributed to revenue growth from $0 to more than $700M.
Attracting significant market attention, Cisco eventually announced it would acquire Webex for $3.2 billion.
Leadership Additions
In September, Zoom announced two key additions to their leadership team. Kimberly L. Hammonds joined the Zoom Board of Directors and Aparna Bawa joined the Zoom executive team as General Counsel. A Zoom press release suggested,
“Hammonds and Bawa will help Zoom scale and drive key strategies including enterprise and international expansion”.
Aparna Bawa has a successful history of sales and acquisitions. In her previous role, she led Magento Commerce’s sale to software giants, Adobe. Before that, Bawa led the Nimble Storage public offering and 2017 acquisition by HPE.
Zoom Future
As the investment and acquisition world prepares for an IPO comeback in 2019, it’s intriguing to see what the future holds for Zoom. After experiencing exponential growth like Eric Yuan’s success at Webex and then Cisco, it isn’t too difficult to imagine a scenario much like the Webex acquisition.
Investment publications across the industry have noted both Slack and Zoom as big players to watch in the technology industry next year, with one publication citing,
“Investors may want to keep an eye out for workplace-messaging platform Slack and video conference software provider Zoom”.
There have been 32 IPOs by Bay Area companies so far in 2018. The addition of Zoom wouldn’t be a complete shock but would be a massive wave for the video collaboration community.
We are reached out to Zoom but are still awaiting formal comment on the situation.
Source: uctoday
Industry: Unified Communication news
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