A year into business, Indian-American remote working startup valued at $600 million

Startups in the remote working space raising money quickly and at high valuations seem to be the new normal as a coronavirus-hit world embraces work from home.

On August 11, document collaboration startup Coda said it raised $80 million in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley’s oldest and marquee venture capital funds, valuing it at $636 million. Its other investors—Khosla Ventures, Greylock and General Catalyst— also participated in the round.

The San Francisco-based startup was launched in 2019. CEO and co-founder Shishir Mehrotra previously held senior roles at Microsoft and YouTube alongside co-founder and college friend Alex DeNeui. Mehrotra was born and raised in the US, his LinkedIn profile says.

The pair started Coda in 2014 to reimagine online documentation— rather than have separate platforms for spreadsheets, documents, presentations and to-do lists, the startup would offer a blank slate where all could be created in one place. Coda could then transform the results into a web application without the need for any code, Forbes reported.

Remote working and online collaborations are not new but have assumed a whole new meaning and scale as the viral outbreak forces employees to work from home.

Even before the pandemic, tools such as Slack and Zoom were widely used but nowhere near the current levels that have sent their share prices zooming—no pun intended.

Upstarts such as Coda, Notion (valued at $2 billion) and older firms such as Zoom and Slack have awoken the tech giants to this opportunity as well. 

“Microsoft launched its Teams product to compete with Slack in 2016, offering a chat-based platform to accompany its Office 365 suite,” Forbes has reported. While Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield initially dismissed the threat of Teams, Microsoft said it had 75 million daily users at the end of April compared to Slack’s 12 million, it said. The skirmish escalated in July when Slack sued Microsoft Teams in the European Union, claiming anti-competitive practices, Forbes said.

These startups challenge apps like Google Drive and Docs, which are far bigger but have sensed the threat. These tools have the same applicability worldwide, so regional equivalents have not sprung up as fast.

However, in India, Reliance Jio launched JioMeet in July. It allows users to connect with up to 100 participants, schedule meetings, or share screens, a service especially of use for remote working.

Rival Bharti Airtel has partnered with Verizon to launch BlueJeans video-conferencing service in the for business customers. It promises enterprise-grade security, including support for WebRTC, encrypted calls and the ability to lock a meeting.

AirMeet is another Indian startup, funded by Accel, which brings offline events online

Disclosure: Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd