Zoomin raises a total of $21 million to turn product content into a strategic asset

As many businesses shift to selling software, product-related content, such as technical documentation, manuals, knowledge base articles, and API guides, has become more vital in ensuring customers can use products successfully. But despite product content’s role in driving better customer experiences, it often gets overlooked by the very companies that spend time and effort creating it. It’s common for different types of content to be siloed across organizational channels with very little thought put into how to best serve it to customers. This often makes it difficult, confusing, and frustrating for customers (and partners) to get their product-related questions answered.

I was first introduced to Zoomin by a friend who recommended meeting a highly product-focused company that came out of the Oracle for Startups Program. The team was somewhat under the radar, focusing their energies on serving their existing customers and growing their business rather than fundraising, which was both rare and impressive.

When I first met the team the opportunity was apparent—as technical product content continues to grow both in volume and importance, Zoomin allows enterprises to leverage this content as a strategic asset that reduces support costs and improves customer satisfaction. Digital transformation has now reached product content, which is why Bessemer was the first investor in Zoomin, the leading provider of knowledge orchestration solutions.

What inspired us to invest in Zoomin

Since our first investment in the company, the Zoomin team has demonstrated a value we think all successful SaaS companies must prioritize: customer obsession. As we’ve seen with Twilio and Shopify, listening to and anticipating customers’ needs paves a culture of innovation and product adoption. Around the time of our first investment, Zoomin had about twenty customers, including major enterprises such as Dell, Avaya, and McAfee. But what most caught our attention when we conducted diligence calls, was that all of them referred to Zoomin as a valued partner versus merely a vendor.

In addition to Zoomin’s commitment to customer-centricity, we saw their business respond to three major trends happening within enterprise software.

1. Every company is either becoming a software company or leveraging digital experiences in some way. This requires a business to maintain more software, and therefore, accumulate volumes of technical documentation and product guidelines that customers need to access.
2. Technical content is increasingly generated by developers and expert technical writers as part of the development process, therefore shifting knowledge from being unstructured formats (word documents, PDFs, etc.) to structured ones (XML, DITA) which are more dynamic and modular for a business. Traditional content publishing tools that were designed for static content, such as whitepapers or manuals, no longer fit within this new paradigm.
3. Customers increasingly expect to get the same great experience they have with consumer products in enterprise services they use at work. Today people are accustomed to getting their questions answered fast, and not having to read an iPhone manual to know how to use their phone. However, when using enterprise products, people are still forced to wade through scores of confusing and often inconsistent technical documents and guides or call a service representative to find an answer. This is exacerbated by the sheer volume of product-related content on B2B websites which makes figuring something out for yourself disorienting and counterproductive. Zoomin’s customers have between thousands to hundreds of thousands of HTML pages dedicated only to product content!

With these three trends on the rise, we were inspired to back Zoomin and see them create a new category around product-related content.

What has happened since our first investment

When we first invested in Zoomin, the company offered a Google-like experience to enhance the knowledge base section of B2B software businesses and personalize the user experience. Since then, the company has significantly expanded its offering to power not only the knowledge base section of the website, but also push the relevant product content to other customer touchpoints, such as the community portal, the internal support service, and even within the product itself. Today, Zoomin ingests all product-related content from multiple silos and delivers an always-updated, personalized product content experience wherever and whenever the end customer needs it. Thus improving the overall product experience.

But even more exciting was seeing Zoomin’s founders—Gal Oron, Hannan Saltzman, and Joe Gelb, evolve as leaders—and the company rapidly scale with more than 5x growth in ARR since our first investment. The team re-engineered its cloud offering to serve larger-scale operations, hired a strong leadership team to drive top-line growth and serve the growing customer base, and is constantly thinking about the challenges ahead.

Most importantly, customers still love the product, as indicated by best-in-class retention—and many customers love the product so much that they’ve even joined the team! We’re excited to see Gal, Hannan, Joe, and everyone at Zoomin continue to build this category, scale the business while maintaining their customer-obsessed mindset, and help their customers turn their product content into a strategic asset.