Sessions, a smart collaboration platform founded by Romanians that competes with products such as Zoom or Teams, attracts €3 million in funding and launches a round on SeedBlink

Sessions Technologies, a company that has developed a smart communication platform that brings together all collaboration tools in one place, is targeting €500,000 in funding on SeedBlink, the European funding and equity management platform for technology start-ups. The funding campaign launched on Friday 15 December and is part of a €3 million expansion round.

Sessions includes Artificial Intelligence functions that allow streamlining processes such as summarizing a meeting, extracting main ideas, and creating lists of the discussed tasks.

The company has already raised €1.5 million, with the lead investor being the Early Bird fund. This brings Early Bird's funding in Sessions Technologies to approximately €2.3 million.

The amount will be used for product development, increasing the user base from 40,000 to 100,000 and covering operational expenses.

A business in which nine million euros have been invested

So far, Sessions has received €9 million in investment: €4.5 million from its founder Radu Negulescu, and €4.5 million through a round raised in February 2022 from EarlyBird, LAUNCHub, and Stride funds. Thus, the current funding is an extension of the 2022 financing.

The idea to launch Sessions emerged during the pandemic when Radu Negulescu - CEO, founder, and the main shareholder of the company - had to organize a meeting of the board of Trencadis, a company he founded when he was 19 years old.

"Because of the complexity of the meeting, I used several tools including Zoom, Google Drive and Miro. I had to simultaneously record, take notes, create to-do lists, and then do the follow-up. Using all these tools at the same time created a fragmented, inefficient, and costly experience. That's when I realized that the way I worked was going to change forever and so in 2020 I founded Sessions, a platform that is majorly differentiated by unifying all of these tools that are themselves billion-dollar markets. So by using Sessions companies can reduce their costs by up to 50% and increase productivity by up to four times. Basically, we are to videoconferencing what the smartphone was for the phone industry. Sessions is the first smart videoconferencing platform," explained Radu Negulescu, CEO and founder of Sessions Technologies.

Among the most successful sales campaigns on AppSumo alongside brands like Shopify or Zapier

The first version of Sessions was launched in February 2021, and in July 2021 it was voted "Product of the Day" and "Product of the Week" on Product Hunt, a site that presents new technology products and services daily. Also in 2021, Sessions won the "Product of the Year" (Golden Kitty Award) in the "Work from Anywhere" category, which is the highest honor offered by Product Hunt. It also placed second in the Software as a Service category in 2022.

Sessions has over 35,000 users globally and has generated sales of €2 million in the last six months. More than 2,500 members around the world in the Sessions community also contribute to the product's development.

Between November and December 2023 the company added 6,300 users, up 148% from October. In the same period, 23,000 meetings were run through the platform with over 98,000 participants.

This year Sessions ran a campaign on AppSumo, a marketplace for digital product offerings and SaaS tools, which generated €1 million in sales in about two months. The campaign was among the five most successful campaigns ever launched on AppSumo (a business launched in 2010) alongside products such as Shopify, Zapier, and Intercom.

Sessions aims to list on the New York Stock Exchange in the long term

"The new round of funding, but also these steps like listing on Product Hunt or AppSumo are important steps we are taking to achieve our major goal: to make the way people work more efficient. The online meetings trend will remain, and the data clearly shows this. Thus, the global market for video conferencing services is estimated to reach $17 billion in 2030 compared to $7.8 billion this year, an annual growth of 11.9%, according to Fortune Business Insights. At the same time, the collaboration software market is expected to grow to $52.9 billion in 2032 from $16.1 billion now, according to Global Market Insights. In this context, our continued goal is to grow our user base, strengthen our market position, and expand product features. In 2024 we want to attract Series A financing, and in the long term our goal is to list on the New York Stock Exchange," added Radu Negulescu.

The company has 26 full-time employees. The company's management team consists of Radu Negulescu - Founder and CEO, Ionut Anisia - Chief Operating Officer, Razvan Duican - Head of Product, Victor Sava - Head of Delivery and Savian Boroanca - Head of Community.

"Sessions is a startup that we wanted very much to bring into our portfolio. It is led by an exceptional executive team, headed by Radu Negulescu. Their product is a solution to a critical need in international teams, transforming the way companies communicate, with a tangible impact on productivity. The SeedBlink campaign is a unique opportunity for private investors and angel investors to join the narrative that the Sessions team is creating, thus contributing to their development at an early stage. This is the first time we are co-investing in a round led by Earlybird, the VC who has believed in UiPath from the beginning”, said Andrei Dudoiu, Managing Partner SeedBlink.

The information provided by KomuniK