Zoomin’s journey from bootstrapped startup to Salesforce’s AI arsenal
Zoomin’s journey from bootstrapped startup to Salesforce’s AI arsenal
What started as a quiet Israeli company is now reshaping customer service with AI.
Many people, except for those at Zoomin and its investors, were surprised by the acquisition of the Israeli company by the software giant Salesforce. The surprise stemmed from the fact that Zoomin had remained relatively quiet within the local industry, and few were aware of the depth of its relationship with Salesforce. Zoomin plays a crucial role in the future of Salesforce, especially as the company is currently undergoing a transformation shaped by the new world of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI. To summarize briefly, the Israeli company is important to Salesforce because it addresses a key challenge and opens up a significant new market for the tech giant.
The collaboration between Zoomin and Salesforce began in 2018, when Salesforce Ventures made a strategic investment. This partnership deepened over the years, culminating in a strategic collaboration agreement and the launch of a joint product earlier this year.
The acquisition comes at a time when companies are focusing on transformation, adding various AI capabilities to their products and services. While access to infrastructure and AI engines has become more affordable and accessible than ever, many companies struggle with preparing and making their organizational data accessible to AI engines, which slows down these processes and diminishes the effectiveness of AI tools in delivering accurate and comprehensive answers. Zoomin specializes in managing unstructured data—data that is not organized in predefined formats, such as text, images, and voice—which is notoriously difficult to analyze and leverage for artificial intelligence applications. Salesforce recognized Zoomin's technology as a solution that could help its customers extract valuable insights from this unstructured data.
Two additional advantages for Salesforce lie in its core business areas: customer service and CRM software. Salesforce's goal is to deliver AI-powered customer service solutions capable of understanding and responding to inquiries in a personalized and efficient manner. Zoomin's technology can enhance Salesforce's AI agents by helping them better understand customer needs and provide more relevant and helpful responses. By combining Salesforce's CRM data with Zoomin's unstructured data management capabilities, Salesforce can gain deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences.
To this end, Zoomin's technology will be integrated into Salesforce's Agentforce platform, enabling customers to easily connect existing organizational information and use it to power AI-based customer experiences. In the initial phase, Zoomin's solution will be integrated into Salesforce's Data Cloud, as well as the Service Cloud (customer service solution), and will eventually support all Salesforce products.
The Israeli company, which had remained under the radar for most of its existence, was founded as a service company in 2007 by Joe Gelb. In 2016, Gal Oron, the current CEO, and Hannan Saltzman joined the company. Together, they operated without raising outside capital (bootstrapped) until 2018, when they secured their first funding round led by Amit Karp of the American fund Bessemer Venture Partners. Bessemer owned 30% of the company at the time of the acquisition, making it the largest beneficiary of the deal, aside from the founders. Other investors, including Viola Ventures and the American fund General Atlantic, owned around 10% of the company. Before the sale to Salesforce, Zoomin had raised slightly more than $70 million, with its last fundraising in 2021 valuing the company at $300 million. After several exits where some investors barely made a profit, this time all investors, founders, and employees profited from the deal. For Salesforce, this acquisition strengthens its position as a leading international employer in Israel, complementing its recent purchase of the company Own for $1.9 billion.
