Many businesses around the world use consumer chat apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, and iMessage to converse and coordinate with staff and exchange documents and data.
Guy Weiss is building Zenzap, an AI-powered private messenger. Zenzap wants to help businesses communicate with their employees and provide organizational context while complying with IT and security rules.
The company has raised $44 million in funding from investors including Bessemer, Lightspeed, and The Garage, as well as private investors such as Wix president Nir Zohar and former EY GM Yoram Tietz.
This fundraiser is interesting because Weiss is raising money for the first time in his career. In 2012, he launched his own e-commerce marketing platform StuccoMedia, which he sold to Market Group in 2015. Then I became an investor for a few years. He founded Zenzap in 2022 after meeting Bessemer partner Adam Fisher and exploring various ideas with current co-founders Norm Newman and Jonathan Bien.
Weiss said he initially bootstrapped the app and worked out of Bessemer’s office.
“I didn’t want to raise capital. All I had to lose was my name. And because the first round was so successful, I was very afraid as a founder that I would do a second round and fail. I didn’t have to work for money. So when I met Adam, I actually started the idea with my own money,” he told TechCrunch.
Weiss said he convinced Fisher that Zenzap should be a venture-backed business because it needs capital to scale.
The idea, he said, was to build a messaging app for a wide range of businesses, from hospitality and construction to health care and fast food.
“You can’t use WhatsApp or iMessage inside a workplace with an AI agent because it’s not IT compliant, so that’s out of the question. You can’t implement Slack or Microsoft Teams because they aren’t built for mobile-first, everyday use cases for average users,” Weiss said.
In addition to regular chat features such as group chat, direct messages, task management, calendar integration, and schedule management, Zenzap offers AI-powered voice chat and search in its free tier. Organizations can unlock voice and video calling, smart task sorting, task templates, and file storage limits by paying for plans starting at $51 per month for up to 20 users. Paid tiers also allow you to use AI search across your workspace and turn messages into tasks.
The company also offers AI agents for workflow automation and AI-powered voice notes and call transcription. We have a credit-based pricing system for these features.
Currently, Zenzap counts organizations such as FedEx, Dollar General, Taco Bell, Starbucks, Casey’s, and Regal among its customers. Weiss added that branches of fast food chains like IHOP and McDonald’s often coordinate shifts or talk about supplies on the platform.
“Each industry has its own use case and workflow to use AI to provide self-service, but they all have something in common,” he said.
The startup has 50 staff in the US, Tel Aviv, and Europe. In the near future, the company wants to hire people in its product and research and development departments.
Bessemers-Fisher said Zenzap’s focus on meeting the needs of a wide range of people could work in its favor. He said even the venture firm is using Messenger to discuss and manage deal flow within its investment team, showing that it can cater to different types of audiences.
“The only work platform that pledges allegiance is Slack, and that is mostly among the developer community. “People are craving a clear separation between work and personal life, and the introduction of personal and work agents makes it imperative to do so now,” he told TechCrunch in an emailed statement.
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