Venue raises $4M from Accel and the CEOs of Slack, Remote, and SquareSpace to give team-wide video meetings a new breath of life

techcrunch.com:

Zoom has in many ways “won” the mindshare game when it comes to video conferencing: whether you’re actually using Zoom, or another service that’s wrapped into another platform like Google or Microsoft, and whether it’s for work or fun, the standalone Zoom is the one that people reference, the one that has claimed anthimeric status.

But for those who use Zoom, or Google’s Meet, Microsoft’s Teams, or something else, you’ll know that they still lack in certain scenarios. Today a startup called Venue built to plug one of those gaps — larger team meetings — is setting out its stall to compete, with a video conferencing platform that brings in a host of personalization and other features from consumer communication apps to make it more engaging. These include emoji bursts, the ability to set background music and backgrounds, easy tools to share videos and other media, gifs, and multi-functional control panels that mimic those that appear in streaming platforms like Twitch.

“Our clients have told us that if Slack made video conferencing for team meetings, this is what it might look like,” said Jason Goldlist, who co-founded the company with Frank Poon, in an interview with me (which took place, naturally, on Venue).

The Toronto-based startup has been in private beta for the past two years, first as a bootstrapped business and then as part of the Y Combinator Winter 2022 cohort.

In that time, it’s picked up some very interesting traction. Its customers include Yelp, Shopify, and PwC; and it’s so far hosted more than 5 million minutes of meetings and 250,000 participants in aggregate.

And now it’s announcing $4 million in seed funding from an impressive list of backers: led by Accel, the group also incudes Stewart Butterfield, the CEO