The company that dragged the office phone into the cloud is now betting the whole switchboard on AI agents that answer, route, and read the room.
How a quiet Markham software company turned buying unloved businesses into a decades-long compounding machine - one contact center, video platform, and telecom system at a time.
Run stable online classes and meetings without managing servers.
KUDO is a New York-based language technology company that delivers real-time speech translation and interpretation for online, in-person, and hybrid meetings and events. It pairs a global network of roughly 12,000 professional human interpreters with its own patented AI speech-to-speech translation engine, letting people speak and be understood across more than 200 spoken and sign languages on platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webex.
Lark is ByteDance's productivity superapp that stitches chat, video meetings, docs, spreadsheets, calendar, and project workflows into one platform, designed for multilingual teams that want to shrink their tool stack without losing power.
Owl Labs is a Boston-based company that builds AI-powered, 360-degree video conferencing devices for hybrid organizations. Its flagship Meeting Owl line is an all-in-one camera, microphone, and speaker that automatically pans and zooms to whoever is talking, aiming to give remote participants an equal seat at the table. Combined with its Owl Intelligence System software and its widely cited annual State of Hybrid Work report, Owl Labs positions itself at the intersection of meeting-room hardware and the broader conversation about how distributed teams work.
Scoot is a Dallas-based B2B software company that runs an AI sales platform built on top of a customizable virtual meeting environment. Founded in 2017 as Preciate and rebranded to Scoot in 2023, the company puts real-time AI agents inside sales meetings, webinars, and events to coach reps, engage buyers, qualify leads, and automate CRM follow-up. Led by founder and CEO Ed Stevens, Scoot pitches itself as a more engaging, brand-able alternative to static tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams for go-to-market teams.
Switchboard was a cloud coworking platform built for remote and hybrid teams. Instead of screen-sharing and tab-juggling, it put video and live, editable web apps - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, Trello and more - side by side in persistent virtual rooms, so a team could return to a project exactly where it left off. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi, the company raised roughly $38 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Icon Ventures, Spark Capital and HubSpot Ventures, and held five patents. In late 2024 Ashkenazi wound down Switchboard and pivoted the company into Airtop, an AI web-agent and browser-automation platform.
Frank Weishaupt is the CEO of Owl Labs, the Boston company behind the Meeting Owl, a 360-degree video conferencing device built for hybrid meetings. He joined in 2018 after two decades in sales and operations leadership at CarGurus, Criteo, Jumptap and Yahoo, and has since made Owl Labs a widely cited voice on the future of work through its annual State of Hybrid Work Report.
Zoom is an American communications technology company that built its name on simple, reliable video meetings and has since expanded into a broad workplace collaboration platform. Founded in 2011 by former Cisco WebEx engineer Eric Yuan and headquartered in San Jose, California, Zoom now offers meetings, phone, chat, rooms, docs, a cloud contact center and an AI Companion assistant under the Zoom Workplace brand. The company went public on Nasdaq in 2019, saw explosive adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic, and today serves individuals, small businesses and large enterprises with roughly $4.9 billion in annual revenue.
DTEN is a San Jose-based hardware company that builds all-in-one video conferencing and collaboration devices for hybrid workplaces, schools, and healthcare. Founded in 2015 by Wei Liu and closely tied to Zoom, DTEN pioneered the all-in-one touchscreen meeting appliance with its D5 and D7 lines and today ships AI-enhanced systems certified for both Zoom Rooms and Microsoft Teams Rooms, combining 4K cameras, microphone arrays, touch whiteboarding, and cloud device management in a plug-and-play package.
Huddly is an Oslo-based company that builds AI-powered conference cameras for hybrid meeting rooms. By running computer-vision neural networks directly on the camera (edge AI), Huddly devices automatically frame speakers, switch angles like a TV director, and improve over time through software updates. Its products work with Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet, and range from the single wide-angle IQ to the L1 and S1 and the multi-camera Huddly Crew system marketed as the world's first AI director. Founded in 2013, Huddly listed on Euronext Growth Oslo in December 2023.
Intermedia Intelligent Communications is a Sunnyvale, California cloud communications company that bundles voice, video, chat, SMS, contact center, business email, file sharing and archiving into a single AI-powered platform. Founded in 1993 as a business email and web hosting provider, it now serves more than 130,000 businesses, largely through a channel of thousands of resellers and managed service providers. Its flagship Unite (UCaaS) and Intelligent Contact Center (CCaaS) products, layered with its SPARK AI suite, aim to replace a stack of separate communication vendors with one reliable, secure system aimed squarely at small and midsize organizations.
Webex is the collaboration platform born from one of the web's first conferencing companies and now run by Cisco. It bundles meetings, calling, messaging, webinars, contact center, and a line of conference-room hardware into a single suite, layered with AI for transcription, real-time translation across dozens of languages, and agent assistance. It serves enterprises, governments, schools, and hospitals that need secure, large-scale communication for distributed teams.
Alvin Nicolas is a technology professional at Webex, Cisco's enterprise collaboration platform headquartered in San Jose, California. With a career spanning telecommunications giants including MCI WorldCom, Microsoft, and Yipes Enterprise Services, Nicolas brings deep networking expertise to one of the world's leading collaboration and video conferencing platforms. He is associated with the AI Titans initiative at Webex, reflecting the company's aggressive push into AI-powered communications and collaboration tools.
Yucheng Zheng is listed as Deputy CEO at Zoom, the San Jose-based video communications company, working from the Bay Area. Public information about this individual is limited; this profile draws on verifiable details about the role context and Zoom itself.

Michael Gold is the Chairman and CEO of Intermedia Intelligent Communications, a Sunnyvale-based AI-powered cloud communications company serving over 150,000 businesses through a network of 7,500 channel partners. Since co-leading Intermedia's acquisition in 2011, Gold has grown the company's revenues and profits more than 7x, transforming it from a hosted email provider into a comprehensive UCaaS and CCaaS platform. A Stanford MBA and electrical engineer by training, Gold is a veteran cloud services operator who previously founded Zlago, led Sphera (acquired by Parallels), and served as SVP at Qwest Communications. His signature strategy - selling through partners who resell under their own brands - has made Intermedia a quiet powerhouse behind some of the biggest names in business communications.
Quentin Gallivan is a Silicon Valley serial technology CEO with over 25 years of experience scaling enterprise software and cloud companies from startup to acquisition. He led BlueJeans Network through its $400-500M acquisition by Verizon in 2020, and previously sold Postini to Google, Aster Data to Teradata, and Pentaho to Hitachi Vantara. Known for taking companies through rapid growth phases and successful exits, he has served as CEO of at least six technology companies across cloud security, SaaS BI, big data, video conferencing, and enterprise architecture.

Thomas C. Holst is a Norwegian-American business architect, investor, and entrepreneur who built Huddly - a Norwegian deep tech computer vision company - from a four-person startup into a publicly listed global enterprise with offices in Oslo, Palo Alto, London, Austin, Washington, and Bangalore. With a career spanning management consulting (A.T. Kearney), private equity (Reiten & Co, Orkla Finance), and deep tech venture building, he has collaborated with Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, Google, and Zoom. After departing Huddly, he co-founded Northscaler - a B2B tech venture firm connecting Nordic startups with global corporations - and became a Partner at ICON Asset Management AG in 2024.

Wei Liu is the founder and CEO of DTEN Inc., a San Jose-based company he started in 2015 that has become a recognized leader in video conferencing hardware and collaboration technology. Drawing on his earlier experience scaling multi-touch hardware at PQ Labs, Liu built DTEN from a single 65-inch touchscreen device into a full portfolio of AI-powered, plug-and-play collaboration systems deployed across enterprise, education, and healthcare environments globally. DTEN's close partnership with Zoom - which made a strategic investment in the company in 2021 - and its expanding support for Microsoft Teams Rooms and other platforms reflects Liu's belief that seamless, equitable collaboration should be available to every participant, in every room.