A bad guitar lesson, a $38 million answer
Switchboard began with a small, ordinary frustration. Founder Amir Ashkenazi was taking guitar lessons over video, and neither he nor his teacher could pull sheet music, a tuner, or a recording into the same shared space. The call could show a face. It could not show the work. That gap - the difference between talking about something and doing it together - became the company.
Founded in 2020, Switchboard set out to rebuild the online meeting from the desk up. Instead of one person "sharing their screen" while everyone else watched, Switchboard created persistent virtual rooms where live, editable web applications - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, Trello, Miro - lived side by side with video. Anyone in the room could grab a cursor and type, click, or edit directly.
The second idea was quieter but arguably more important: persistence. A Switchboard room did not evaporate when the call ended. Close the laptop, return the next morning, and every document and app was exactly where the team left it. Onboarding got its own room. Design reviews got theirs. The standup lived somewhere permanent.
Ashkenazi is a serial founder - he had started and sold companies including Shopping.com and Adap.tv before this - and he assembled a team drawn from Apple, eBay, Samsung, Mozilla, and Dropbox. Investors noticed. By the middle of 2022, Switchboard had raised roughly $38 million and held five patents.
It is also, now, a company that no longer sells coworking software. In late 2024 Ashkenazi made the founder's hardest call and wound the product down, pivoting the company into Airtop, an AI web-agent platform. This dossier is the record of what Switchboard was, and why people paid attention.
The meeting was finished. The work still wasn't.
Video conferencing solved presence - it let distributed people see and hear each other. What it never solved was doing. The moment a team needed to actually build something together, someone said "let me share my screen," and everyone else became a passenger, watching a single person drive a single cursor through a single set of tabs.
Switchboard's answer was to treat the browser tab as furniture you could arrange in a shared room. Rather than broadcasting a picture of an app, it embedded the real, working app - multiplayer, clickable, editable by everyone present. The problems it targeted were specific and familiar:
Screen-share passivity
One driver, many spectators. Switchboard gave everyone hands on the same live tools instead of a broadcast to watch.
Lost context
Meetings reset to zero every time. Persistent rooms kept documents, tabs, and notes exactly in place between sessions.
Tab and app sprawl
Switchboard collected the tools a task needed - docs, boards, tickets - into one arranged space instead of twenty scattered tabs.
Thin async handoffs
Because a room lived on, a teammate in another time zone could walk into the same workspace and pick up where things stood.
Built for teams that live in the browser
Switchboard was a business-to-business product aimed at distributed teams whose work already lived in web apps: startups, creative and marketing agencies, higher-education groups, and enterprise teams. It launched in beta in 2022 and reported thousands of users across organizations worldwide.
In the market, Switchboard occupied the space between two crowded neighborhoods. On one side sat pure video conferencing - Zoom, Google Meet - which handled presence but not shared work. On the other sat single-purpose collaboration canvases and pair-programming tools such as Miro, Figma, Tuple, Tandem, Around, and Gather.
Switchboard's wager was that neither category delivered a true "office": a durable, multi-app place a team could inhabit rather than visit. Its differentiator was the combination of live third-party apps, real multiplayer interaction, and persistence - a room that remembered its own history. That is a harder thing to build, which is part of why the company held five patents on the approach.
The same wager cut the other way. A category defined by "a better meeting" is adjacent to habits that are hard to move, and in late 2024 the team judged the opportunity ahead of it - AI web agents - to be larger. Hence the pivot to Airtop.
From rooms to agents
Cloud coworking rooms
Persistent virtual rooms combining video with live, multiplayer web apps - Docs, Figma, Jira, Trello, Miro - so teams worked side by side with all context preserved.
In-room tools & notepad
Built-in apps such as a shared notepad let teams capture notes and materials directly inside the same persistent space.
Airtop (successor)
After winding Switchboard down, the company pivoted into Airtop - an AI web-agent and browser-automation platform where agents log in, browse, extract data, and complete web tasks from plain-language instructions.
B2B SaaS subscriptions
Seat- and team-based plans for distributed teams, with a free on-ramp from the 2022 beta leading into paid team tiers.
Roughly $38 million, from serious rooms
The cap table doubled as a vote of confidence from operators who had built collaboration tools themselves:
Five years, one clear arc
Switchboard founded
Amir Ashkenazi starts the company to make remote collaboration feel like working side by side.
Beta launch & $13.8M seed
Switchboard emerges from stealth in May with its cloud coworking rooms and announces seed funding.
$25M Series A
Icon Ventures leads a $25M round in July with Sequoia, Spark, HubSpot Ventures and Cisco Investments - total funding reaches ~$38M.
Product updates, then a hard decision
In-room tools like a shared notepad ship, as the founder weighs whether to persist or pivot.
Pivot to Airtop
Switchboard winds down and rebrands into Airtop, an AI web-agent platform. switchboard.app now redirects to airtop.ai.
What made it different
Three things set Switchboard apart from the tools it sat beside. First, real apps, not pictures of apps: embedded third-party software that everyone in the room could operate, rather than a broadcast screen. Second, persistence: rooms that carried their contents forward indefinitely, turning a meeting into a place. Third, depth of engineering: making live, multiplayer web apps behave inside a shared canvas is technically hard, and the company's five patents reflected the effort.
The expertise behind it was equally particular. Ashkenazi had spent a career founding and selling companies, and his team carried experience from Apple, eBay, Samsung, Mozilla, and Dropbox - people who had shipped consumer and infrastructure software at scale. That pedigree is part of why strategic investors like HubSpot Ventures and Cisco Investments, alongside Sequoia and Icon, were willing to back a bet on the shape of the remote-work office.
Five things about Switchboard
A guitar lesson
The idea came from Ashkenazi's inability to share sheet music and tools with his teacher inside a video call.
Six-time entrepreneur
Ashkenazi previously founded and sold companies including Shopping.com and Adap.tv.
Rooms that remembered
Close the laptop and the entire workspace - apps and documents - was waiting when you came back.
A redirect tells the story
switchboard.app now forwards to airtop.ai, the AI web-agent company Switchboard became.
Demos, talks & deeper reading
Switchboard product demos
Walkthroughs of persistent rooms and side-by-side web apps.
Find demo videos on YouTube →
Amir Ashkenazi, on building & pivoting
Product Hunt AMA with the founder of Airtop, Adap.tv and Shopping.com.
Read the AMA →
Persist or pivot?
The founder's reflection on the hardest decision behind the Switchboard-to-Airtop shift.
Read the essay →
TechCrunch: virtual rooms
Coverage of how Switchboard used rooms to foster better collaboration.
Read on TechCrunch →
Questions people ask
What did Switchboard do?
Switchboard was a cloud coworking platform that combined video with live, editable web apps in persistent virtual rooms, letting remote and hybrid teams work side by side instead of screen-sharing.
Who founded Switchboard?
It was founded in 2020 by Amir Ashkenazi, a serial entrepreneur who previously founded companies including Shopping.com and Adap.tv.
How much funding did Switchboard raise?
Roughly $38 million in total, including a $13.8M seed round and a $25M Series A in July 2022 led by Icon Ventures, with backers such as Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, HubSpot Ventures and Cisco Investments.
How was it different from Zoom or Google Meet?
Rather than sharing a single screen, Switchboard put whole web apps into a shared, multiplayer room that persisted between sessions - so teams returned to a project exactly where they left off, with everyone able to interact directly.
Is Switchboard still operating?
The original coworking product was wound down. The company pivoted in late 2024 to early 2025 into Airtop, an AI web-agent and browser-automation platform, and switchboard.app now redirects to airtop.ai.