If you work in an office, nothing is worse than not finding a place to meet, only to walk by rows of booked, empty conference rooms.
It’s a phenomenon Vyopta calls zombie meetings, and it’s plaguing unwitting offices worldwide. A major contributor is when an employee leaves a company but their standing meetings remain booked.
As larger companies adopt open-plan office spaces, zombie meetings can lead them to the false assumption that they need more meeting rooms. Resulting decisions to expand unnecessarily can cost a company millions of dollars, said Ivan Montoya, Vyopta’s vice president of marketing and business development.
It’s an issue the Austin-based company aims to vanquish in its pursuit to help offices collaborate more efficiently.
“We’re a data company,” Montoya said. “We integrate with their calendar system and can identify rooms that aren’t used.”
Founded in 2007, Vyopta provides a monitoring and analytics tool aimed at optimizing workplace collaboration. Those efforts are gaining traction, as the company announced today that it has raised $7.5 million in a Series B round led by Elsewhere Partners.
The funding will be used to help the company expand its platform and grow its teams, Montoya said.
Vyopta primarily work with large enterprises that rely on video conferencing and other tools to coordinate with team members around the world. Its platform allows them to collect data on how those tools are working and manage them. If something breaks, their system will identify it and alert the IT person who can fix it. If their rooms aren’t being used properly, they can see that information and make the necessary adjustment.
As collaboration tools continue to play a greater role in businesses, Vyopta has only grown, experiencing 80 percent growth in new business in 2019, Montoya said. The company has also added vice presidents for its engineering, product, sales and customer success teams within the last two years.
With this round, Vyopta aims to grow its 60-person team to 75, adding new team members across each of those teams by the end of the year.
“We’re benefitting from the huge growth of video conferencing technology,” Montoya said. “All of these companies are investing in collaboration technology, and they need tools to help manage all that.”
