Loom cofounders CTO Vinay Hiremath and CEO Joe Thomas.
It’s nearing 10 p.m. and Ashton Kutcher’s $14 million Beverly Hills mansion is finally quiet. The actor, producer and venture capitalist has just finished his fourth and latest job: kindergarten and pre-school teacher to his three and five-year-old kids.
“Now that we’re homeschooling our kids, the part of the day that would normally be blocked for work is blocked for my kids. I end up doing a lot of my work at 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock at night when people aren't available to do a call,” Kutcher told Forbes last month while quarantining in his home. “And that’s when Loom becomes super, super valuable.”
Loom’s app lets you easily record your screen and your face before instantly sharing the link via email or message. While video products like Google Meet and Zoom have surged as quarantined workers use them to conduct live meetings, it doesn’t address the common workplace gripe that meetings (in person or virtual) are wastes of peoples’ time. Typical video recording is clunky, requiring a significant amount of storage and computing power. The company’s cofounder and CEO Joe Thomas says that “Loom and video messaging specifically is like a superpower for employees.”
Loom quickly enables workers to provide project feedback or walk someone through a proposal, without having to set an actual meeting. Kutcher uses it most frequently to deliver notes on scripts and feedback on venture pitches. “That stuff is just more easily done through a Loom video than just written script notes,” he says. “You actually need the virtual object and the explanation at the same time, in addition to conveying the real emotion.”
Kutcher is far from the only fan. Today, Loom closed a $28.75 million second Series B, led by Sequoia Capital and Coatue. The deal values the company at an estimated $350 million, doubling the valuation from a previous fundraise seven months ago. Loom has raised $73 million from investors including Kutcher, Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, Atlassian’s Jay Simons and Figma’s Dylan Field. Kleiner Perkins and messaging giant Slack have also invested in multiple rounds.
As share-economy juggernauts like Uber and Airbnb undergo layoffs en masse and face an uncertain future in the age of Covid-19, business booms for virtual work companies like Loom. Already a powerful trend before the coronavirus, the fortunes of remote work companies have rocketed to new heights under the global lockdown. Last week, Zoom hit an all-time high with a market cap just shy of $50 billion. Loom too has seen a surge as its users have doubled to 4 million since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a world health emergency on January 30.
And use cases are growing beyond the business world. While investors like Kutcher use the platform to provide feedback on startup pitches, some educators now rely on Loom to create lessons for students to review on their own time. In addition to temporarily dropping pricing for its premium service Loom Pro amidst Covid-19, the company announced on March 12 that verified teachers and students will receive free, permanent access to the premium version. Thousands of educators have taken up Loom on that offer and continue to flood social media with ways they are using it to bring their classrooms online.
Loom’s 30-year-old cofounder Thomas, who nabbed a spot on the 2017 Forbes Under 30 list (with cofounders Vinay Hiremath and Shahed Khan), comes from a generation that grew up idolizing Mark Zuckerberg. When Facebook became the world’s most popular social media platform in December 2009, Thomas was a sophomore economics major at Indiana University. As he watched complex investing products and crushing debt spark the Great Recession, he became increasingly disillusioned with the prospect of finishing his degree and pursuing a finance career. In 2012, just shy of graduation, he dropped out of school to move to Santa Monica, California to start a life in tech coding websites.
As fully initiated members in the Cult of Zuckerberg, Thomas took his February 2016 assertion that “video is a megatrend, almost as big as mobile” as gospel. Just as video became popular on consumer apps like Snapchat, Thomas searched for ways it could fit into work.
“The two big bets that we made was that one, there was a ton of latent behavior based off of consumers’ increased comfort with video,” says Thomas. “The second was that if we made it as frictionless as possible, that this could be something that was a day-to-day communication tool. And frictionless is not just ease of use, we made it free.”
Loom’s first product hit the market June 2016. It was a simple, free Chrome extension that instantly made recordings that were sharable via a link. The company didn’t release a more comprehensive Mac and PC application with editing and storage capabilities until March 2019.
What it looks like to receive a Loom while on the company's newly released enterprise offering.
Over the past year, the company has focused on building out its first enterprise offering, Loom for Teams, which officially launched last week. The cloud-based program lets companies create a central library of Loom videos giving staff quick access training videos, presentations and more. It also provides much stricter security safeguards, which has become increasingly important as distributed teams work from less secure systems in home offices and personal devices. More than 100 companies, including Slack, Hubspot, and real estate firm JLL, are already on the beta version.
“I love Loom because it allows me to more personally connect with people without having to do 75 different one-on-one calls, which is just impossible at scale,” says Hubspot Chief People Officer Katie Burke, who uses looms for weekly updates to her international 3,500-person workforce. “Video is such an easier and better mechanism to make that happen versus just plain text.”
To address the increased demand and build new products, Thomas has hired 30 employees since the end of January and continues to rapidly scale his engineering team (including appointing Google Suite veteran Jude Flannery as VP of Engineering). With 80 individuals currently on the payroll, the company projects it will have 125 employees by the end of the year.
And while most companies have scrambled to adjust to work under Covid-19 shutdowns, Loom has had a distributed workforce from the start. Any employee can work in its base in San Francisco or from anywhere in the world. “What it boils down to flexibility,” says Thomas, who has employees everywhere from Portugal to Australia to Brazil. “We structure our company with the goal of being able to work with the most talented people wherever they are and without them feeling like they're not part of the headquarters.”
Loom’s greatest challenge now is converting the two million users that have joined the platform during lockdown into lifelong users. Thomas bets that even as states open back up, working from home—and via Loom—will be core to the future of work. Tech’s biggest players are already making the move: Twitter announced earlier this month that employees could work from home as long as they see fit, and Zuckerberg followed suit last week announcing that many Facebook employees could permanently work from home. (Further, studies increasingly show that a growing number of companies anticipate going fully remote or expanding work-from-home policies.)
“We’ve seen amazing metrics as this remote workforce continues to play out,” says Thomas. “Video messaging is an inevitability in this increasingly globally distributed world. It’s incredibly efficient, effective and expressive. We are going to be at the forefront of this workplace communication revolution.”
