Israeli startup Zula, the team communication app founded by VoIP pioneers Jeff Pulver (Vonage) and Jacob Ner-David (Delta Three), has closed a $3 million series A round. The round was led by Morton Meyerson of 2M, who is joined by Ourcrowd, Microsoft Ventures, Nathan Low, and Doug Pauly.
The continuing backing from Microsoft Ventures — which previously invested an undisclosed amount in Zula as part of a second seed round — is noteworthy considering Microsoft’s ownership of both Yammer and Skype, and a number of other communications and collaboration products.
More broadly, the work collaboration and communication space is as crowded as ever. Just yesterday, Pie closed a seed round of $800,000 to compete with a host of other upstarts in the enterprise collaboration space, such as Slack, which recently raised a hefty $42.75 million, as well as a host of other companies including Convo, Hipchat, Hall, and CoTap.
Describing itself these days as a cross-platform team communication app, Zula was first unveiled to the world in July of last year, and then went on to appear in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in San Francisco that September as the audience choice.
The app enables teams of all sizes to communicate with features such as file sharing, group conference calling, team messaging and polling, as well as one-to-one communication. It’s mobile-first, initially launching on iOS and then Android.
Zula previously raised $1.1 million in seed financing from Kima Ventures, Rhodium, Ourcrowd, Gigy Levy-Weiss, Adi Sofer-Teeny, Magna, David Draiman, and Oded Vardi bringing its total funding to $4.1 million.
