Zenzap Raises $44 Million for AI Chat App Aimed at Replacing WhatsApp in the Workplace.

Zenzap Is Used by Organizations Including Starbucks and Taco Bell

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Many businesses around the world use consumer chat applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord or iMessage to communicate and coordinate with employees and exchange documents or data.

Guy Weiss is building Zenzap, an AI-powered private messenger that wants to help companies connect with and arm their employees within their organization while complying with IT and security regulations.

The company has raised $44 million in funding from investors including Bessemer, Lightspeed, and The Garage, as well as individual investors Wix CEO Nir Zohar and former EY CEO Yoram Tietz.

The fundraiser is interesting because Weiss is raising money for the first time in his career. In 2012, he launched e-commerce marketing platform StuccoMedia and sold it to Market Group in 2015. After that, he became an investor for several years. In 2022, he founded ZenZap after meeting Bessemer partner Adam Fischer and exploring various ideas with his current co-founders, Noam Neumann and Jonathan Bean.

Weiss said he first bootstrapped the program and worked out of Bessemer's office.

I didn't want to raise capital. The only thing I had to lose was my name, and I was too scared to do a second round as a founder and fail because my first round was so successful. I didn't need to work for money. So, when I met Adam, I actually started my idea with my own capital.

Weiss said Fisher convinced him that Zenzap should be a venture-backed business because the company needed capital to scale.

He said the idea was to build a messaging app for a range of businesses, from hospitality and construction to healthcare and fast food.

“You can't use WhatsApp or iMessage at work with an AI agent on top of it because it's not compatible with IT. So that's off the table. You can't implement Microsoft's Slack and Teams because they are not built for this everyday mobile use case intended for casual users.

Zenzap offers the usual chat features in its free tier, including group chats and direct messages, task management, calendar integration, schedule management, as well as voice chat and AI-powered search. Organizations can pay for plans starting at $51 per month for up to 20 users to unlock voice and video calling, intelligent task sorting, work templates and higher file storage limits. The paid tier also lets you use AI search across your workspace and turn messages into tasks.

The company also offers AI agents for workflow automation as well as AI-assisted transcription of voice notes and calls. For these features, it has a credit-based pricing system.

Currently, Zenzap lists organizations such as FedEx, Dollar General, Taco Bell, Starbucks, Casey's and Regal as customers. Weiss added that branches of fast food chains such as IHOP and McDonald's often coordinate changes and talk about rolling out on their platform.

“Each vertical has its own use case and workflows that are arbitrarily delivered by AI, but they all have some commonalities,” he said.

The startup has 50 employees in the US, Tel Aviv and Europe. In the near future, the company wants to hire in its production and research and development department.

Bessemer's Fisher said Zenzap's focus on serving a wide range of people could work to its advantage. He said that even the investment firm uses messenger in its investment team to discuss and manage the flow of trades, showing that it can respond to different types of audiences.

"The only work platform with any loyalty is Slack, and that's almost entirely among the developer community. Zendesk doesn't focus on developers, it focuses on the other 99% of employees who use personal messaging apps and wait for their agent. People desperately want a clear separation of work from personal life, and accepting that makes personal work separate from personal life." TechCrunch in an emailed statement.

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Evan covers global developments in consumer technology at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked for publications including The Huffington Post and The Next Web.

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