Switchboard, a collaboration app that combines video conferencing and digital whiteboarding features, today announced it has raised $25 million in a Series A round that values the company at $200 million post-money. Sequoia led the tranche with participation from XYZ and Spark Capital, bringing Switchboard’s total to $38.4 million.
Co-founder and CEO Amir Ashkenaz told businesskinda.com that the new capital will be put into building Switchboard’s team and product.
“I founded Switchboard in June 2020 and it actually stemmed from a frustration with remote guitar lessons I was taking. My teacher and I couldn’t bring the tools we needed into the online class — things like a metronome, a PDF viewer for notes and sheet music, a media player for backtracks, a second camera to see fingerpicking, etc.” Ashkenaz said in an email interview: “What I realized was that all of our current ‘collaboration tools’ are really just communication tools, allowing text, audio, video communication or screen sharing, but not really doing things together. This wasn’t just a problem for my music lessons, but also for remote working around the world, where teams try to build products, manage projects or brainstorm new ideas together.What started as technology for better guitar lessons evolved into Switchboard: a cloud-based co-working space built specifically for remote working.”
Ashkenaz previously served as the president of AOL platforms before co-launching Tookee, an AI and speech technology company that LogMeIn later acquired for an undisclosed sum. Ashkenaz co-founded Switchboard with ex-Databricks software engineer Chris Jones, Macro Iacono and Daniel Shteremberg, the latter of whom was the senior product manager at Zoox before Amazon bought it in 2020.

Image Credits: Switchboard
Switchboard allows users to run multiple web-based apps including Google Docs, Figma, Trello, and Jira in a single “virtual room.” Rather than switching between tabs and apps or having to share someone’s screen, Switchboard is designed to bring materials to a shared space. For example, users can create permanent public and private spaces where apps and files for projects and recurring meetings remain open the next time they’re ready to collaborate. Each room has a “meeting memory”, which contains a history of chat threads and all shared content.
Ashkenaz claims that Switchboard traffic between a user’s customer and the company’s infrastructure is encrypted in-flight and at rest. The company does not and does not intend to sell the data it stores.
During the pandemic, when many employees switched from the office to working from home, the market for digital collaboration apps exploded. In 2020, a report from White Star Capital estimated that $35 billion in venture capital was invested in collaboration companies including Postman, Workvivo, Slack and Zoom between 2017 and 2020.
“We started Switchboard during the pandemic in response to tools that weren’t built for true collaboration,” Ashkenaz said. “It’s not a hard sell… Remote working saved our economy during the pandemic and now we’re seeing it emerge as a preference for many workers. [But companies] have first-hand experience of some of the limitations of video conferencing: worries about sharing their personal desktop, fatigue from staring at faces all day, and frustration at having to re-share what was shared during the meeting via screen sharing or chat .”
When asked about the competition, Ashkenaz says he sees Switchboard’s rivals fall into a few different categories, namely video conferencing, virtual office, and vertical collaboration. But he argues that none of them adequately address the challenges Switchboard had to overcome.

Image Credits: Switchboard
“Virtual meeting tools like Zoom or Google Meet are great for communication. But they don’t work with a web-based app, don’t make any website directly collaborative, don’t provide permanent spaces for meetings and projects, nor do they provide an extensive space for visual collaboration,” said Ashkenaz. “Meanwhile, vertical collaboration tools like Figma and Miro provide scope for visual collaboration and some communication tools, but they are more focused applications for design and whiteboard, respectively.”
Ashkenaz declined to say how many customers or users Switchboard has. But he claims the platform is “growing rapidly” and seeing applications from “startups to agencies to higher education”.
“The communication tools and apps we use to get work done are only loosely connected and the only option we have to connect them is screen sharing. The industry suffers from too many tools and too little coherence,” said Ashkenaz. “We think remote working will be the future of work if we have the right tools to really support it. Collaboration tools should seamlessly combine communication and the applications we use. The challenge is really one of employee behavior, with video conferencing and screen sharing being deeply ingrained in our behavior. But most employees also realize how inadequate those tools are and want something better.”
Switchboard currently has 22 employees and plans to increase that number to 36 by the end of the year.
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