Zoomin, a “knowledge orchestration” platform that helps users extract answers from enterprise documentation, today revealed it has raised $ 21 million. Investors include Salesforce Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Viola Growth, and the investment, which had been undisclosed before today, came in the form of several tranches starting in 2018.
Zoomin was founded in 2015 and has hubs in New York and Tel Aviv. The company aims to help businesses make their vast pools of technical content easier to find and more usable. Companies may have many thousands of manuals, guides, training paraphernalia, online community discussions, and more, but all this disparate content is typically created and managed by different teams, people, and systems and often exists in silos. Zoomin “unifies” this content and delivers it in a more “intuitive and personalized way,” according to CEO and cofounder Gal Oron.
White label
Zoomin’s product can perhaps be crudely described as a white label search engine for enterprise product content, though Oron argues traditional federated search solutions focus on indexing content and taking users from their point of search to whatever external channel contains the results. Zoomin, on the other hand, can bring answers to the user wherever they conduct the search from.
“This means they don’t need to navigate across different sites and experience the fragmentation and drop-off that naturally accompanies this kind of ‘context switching,’” Oron told VentureBeat.
How Zoomin is used largely depends on what the customer needs from it. It could be a standalone technical resource center, perhaps something akin to a companywide intranet or even a public portal, transforming disparate static content into a dynamic search interface replete with filters, auto-suggestions, recommendations, and more. Or it could be a widget that offers content relevant to the context of a given situation, baked into the customer’s own applications, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
“In some cases, customers replace their existing portals with Zoomin, in other cases they keep their portal but use Zoomin to create an enhanced, intuitive, personalized experience,” Oron added.
Above: Zoomin “in-product”
Zoomin ships with various integration options, including REST APIs, JavaScript APIs, and command line interfaces (CLIs). It also offers prebuilt apps that can be downloaded, customized, and integrated with Salesforce or ServiceNow.
Above: Zoomin integrated into Salesforce
Under the hood, Zoomin says it uses both supervised and unsupervised machine learning (ML) models, developed and trained in-house, alongside off-the-shelf ML services.
“Zoomin’s knowledge graph ties together enterprise content, users, and interactions, powering the platform’s text analysis and classification, dynamic ranking, content recommendations, and predictive insights,” Oron explained.
Analytics also play a sizable role in Zoomin’s offering, including “traffic insights” that detail where traffic is coming from (including the referring domain and location); “content insights” that surface which topics and publications receive the most engagement; and “search insights” that give companies search pattern data that can be used to tweak the UX.
“These insights are designed to help our customers understand what users are searching for, learn which search terms are yielding no results, analyze the usage of search filters, and more,” Oron added.
Above: Zoomin: Content freshness analytics
Although Zoomin has operated fairly under the radar, it has amassed a number of notable clients, including now Adobe-owned Workfront, Chinese hospitality giant Shiji, and cybersecurity veteran Imperva.
Zoomin was entirely bootstrapped up until Bessemer’s inaugural investment in 2018, which was followed by Salesforce Ventures’ investment in 2019. Both VC firms reinvested in the startup this year, alongside Israel’s Viola Growth.