Zoomin, which helps enterprises extract answers from siloed technical documents, raises $52M

Zoomin, a platform that helps enterprises extract answers from across their product content, has raised $52 million in a series C round of funding.

The “knowledge orchestration” platform has amassed an impressive roster of clients since its inception six years ago, including Dell, McAfee, Imperva, and the now Adobe-owned Workfront, helping make their vast pools of content easier to search and extract answers from. Businesses may have thousands of manuals, guides, training documents, online community discussions, and more, each created and managed by different teams in silos. Zoomin unifies all of these parts, serving as a sort of white-label search engine that delivers answers wherever a company needs them.

“Every enterprise generates hundreds to hundreds of thousands of pages of product content meant to help customers utilize products to their fullest potential,” Zoomin CEO and cofounder Gal Oron told VentureBeat. “This content is constantly evolving and growing in volume alongside the products it supports. But most of the time, the product content experience is severely lacking — it fails to provide customers product information in an easily accessible, seamless way across the range of channels where they are looking for it. When customers can’t find relevant information quickly and easily, this limits product adoption and onboarding and leads to frustrated customers, creating churn and burdening customer support teams.”

For example, a company might use Zoomin to build a technical resource center similar to an intranet — where employees can search for all manner of business documentation, such as financials or how-to guides that are spread across different locations. Zoomin bakes in a bunch of useful features, including content filters, auto-suggestions, recommendations, and other tools users are likely accustomed to from other search platforms they use.

Alternatively, a company may elect to deploy Zoomin directly inside one of their own applications as a widget that offers context-specific content.

Above: Zoomin in-product

Zoomin also offers prebuilt apps that can be customized and integrated with Salesforce or ServiceNow, while companies can deploy their own integrations via Zoomin’s APIs.

Above: Zoomin integrated into Salesforce

Other similar products that enterprises might use include Adobe Experience Manager or Liferay, but Zoomin aims to set itself apart with a focus on its “bespoke” solution built specifically for complex, technical content. Moreover, Oron argues that enterprises value Zoomin’s inherent agility.

“We can get them up and running in weeks and enable full customization with minimal added costs and no reliance on IT resources while connecting to any system they’re already using,” he said. “Plus, we offer out-of-the-box actionable analytics.”

There are also existing universal search tools for enterprises, and although they may bring search results into a single interface, they typically direct the user to the original source of the content. Zoomin brings all the answers into a single channel and saves users having to navigate across different destinations.

The story so far

Founded in 2015, Zoomin has been on a tear over the past year, claiming to have “more than doubled” its new customers since 2019. Moreover, the company announced a $21 million investment in December, although that was from a previously undisclosed round. Since then, Zoomin has introduced offline support, which Oron said is particularly relevant for field technical support: “for example, when field engineers need to be able to instantly access critical information as they solve hardware issues, often operating with limited network connection.”

With another $52 million in the bank, Oron said it’s now well-financed to “meet the growing demand from enterprises across industries,” spanning a wider gamut of hardware and software companies.

“While our sweet spot has historically been SaaS and hardware companies, a diverse mix of new industries are now recognizing the strategic value of investing in their product information experience,” he said. “We’re seeing strong demand from fintech and health care industries, in particular. In addition, while the majority of our customers are large U.S-based enterprises, we’re seeing that mid-market and growth companies are facing the same pain points that we are solving for enterprises.”

While Zoomin already offers a range of analytics, such as “traffic insights” that show where traffic is being referred from and “content insights” that highlight which topics or documents garner the greatest engagement, Oron said the company plans to use some of its fresh cash injection to develop “new in-product and sales analytics features and case deflection analytics tools” and improve its platform’s existing search and prediction capabilities.

Underpinning much of this growth is a desire to alleviate some of the burden from companies’ technical or customer support teams — Zoomin basically helps companies build their own self-serve product support portals, leaning on machine learning models to develop a knowledge graph that bridges enterprise content and the end users that are likely to find most use from it.

“Customers are expressing a strong desire to self-serve product answers rather than rely on customer support teams and, secondly, more and more businesses are experiencing remote work,” Oron said. “As a result, [they are] increasingly relying on digital support channels. This makes the need and demand for a self-service product content experience more urgent than ever.”

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