Virtual Assistant Zoom.ai Wins $100,000 Pitch Contest

Toronto’s Zoom.ai took home top honours at OpenText’s EnterpriseWorld technology pitch contest Thursday and the grand prize of $100,000.

The company is behind an automated virtual assistant that’s built to save you time. In the palm of your hand, Zoom.ai can book meetings, schedule reminders, look up a client’s contact details and perform other routine – but necessary – administrative tasks. It takes care of business busywork and helps to boost user productivity.

Jesse Albiston, head of customer success, led the company’s winning pitch at EnterpriseWorld where he addressed a panel of C-level executives and venture capitalists.

“Using AI and natural language processing through a chat interface, we’re able to create technology that mimics a real executive assistant,” Albiston said.

On stage, Albiston revealed in real-time how Zoom.ai can research and describe a person, using OpenText’s CMO Adam Howatson in the demo. The crowd saw how the virtual assistant can create a personality snapshot and showed Howatson how powerful the enterprise solution can really be.

“This win and funding gives us two more months of runway to get to our Series A funding,” said Albiston. “It gives us more time to build up our product and our 12-person team.”

The latest win added more momentum to a tech startup that’s already on a roll. Zoom.ai won the top prize at HR Tech Summit’s Tech Den in June and recently closed a $2.1 million seed round.

“Our growth is attributed to an incredible team and our incredible CEO Roy Pereira. He built an A class team. Our focus now is on finding the right partners; enterprises looking to truly transform,” Albiston said.

Last year, Zoom.ai was named one of Canada’s 20 most innovative technology companies.