The fund will stimulate the growth of Zoom’s apps ecosystem.

Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ: ZM) said Monday it was launching the Zoom Apps Fund, a new $100 million venture fund created to stimulate the growth of Zoom’s ecosystem of Zoom Apps, integrations, developer platform, and hardware.

The new fund will invest amounts ranging from $250,000 and $2.5 million in startups that aim to revolutionize the way in which Zoom customers meet, collaborate, and communicate on its rapidly expanding platform. (Intrado GlobeNewsWire)

Zoom’s app ecosystem

Zoom’s app platform already features partnerships for:

• Collaboration, like Atlassian, Asana, Box, Dropbox, Slack, and Wrike
• Education, like Coursera, Kahoot!, and Kaltura
• Enhancing the meeting and webinar experience and expression, like Cameo, Exer for Exercise classes, and Slido for polls and QA
• Personal productivity, like Superhuman for email, Woven for calendaring, Pitch for presentations, Smartsheet for spreadsheets, and Coda for living documents
• Sales and marketing, like HubSpot, Chorus, and Gong
• Whiteboarding on a Zoom Room touchscreen device, including Lucidspark, Miro, and Mural
• Support and incident response, like ServiceNow and PagerDuty

“Think of Zoom Apps as an app store right where you need it most — in a Zoom meeting, room, chat, webinar, phone call, and even your contacts directory,” Zoom says on its website.

Zoom Apps helps bring users’ critical applications directly into the Zoom experience.

“What I’ve learned over the past year is that we need to keep meetings productive and fun,” said Eric S. Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zoom. “My hope is that the Zoom Apps Fund will help our customers meet happier and collaborate even more seamlessly, and at the same time help entrepreneurs build new businesses as our platform evolves.”

Fund structure

According to Reuters, which quoted Zoom Chief Financial Officer Kelly Steckelberg, the fund will not be structured as a separate and independent VC entity. Instead, it will appear on Zoom’s balance sheet.

It will also not demand board seats from founders and will play the role of a strategic investor.

Zoom and the pandemic

The pandemic forced businesses across the world to look for ways to work and interact remotely. Zoom was a natural beneficiary and Zoom meetings attracted 300 million participants a day by April 2020 — 30 times the amount just four months earlier.

For its full fiscal year 2021, ended January 31, 2021, Zoom reported total revenue of $2,651.4 million, up 326% year-over-year.

Net income per share for the year surged to $2.25 per share from $0.09 per share for the fiscal year 2020.

Related Story:     A $200M Fund From Crypto.com To Support Crypto Startups