Startups

Mio raises $8.7M Series A to make enterprise messaging interoperable

Comment

Image Credits: Morsa Images / Getty Images

Mio, a startup that helps enterprise teams collaborate across messaging services like Zoom Chat, Microsoft Teams, Slack and Cisco’s Webex, today announced that it has raised an $8.7 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Zoom and Cisco Investments. In total, Austin-based Mio, which was founded in 2016 and participated in the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class, has now raised $17 million. Other investors include Goldcrest Capital, Eniac Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator and Capital Factory.

While being able to chat across platforms isn’t usually a problem that comes up inside a company, it does become an issue when you’re working across organizations. Traditionally, those kinds of conversations used to happen in pre-planned meetings, whether in-person or virtually, but the pandemic only accelerated the move toward enterprise messaging services for this use case, too.

Image Credits: Mio

As Mio CEO and co-founder Tom Hadfield told me, you may think that the different players in this field would want to keep their walled gardens closed off from competitors, but the fact that Zoom and Cisco are investing in Mio shows that interoperability is very much on their minds. He also noted that Microsoft and Meta recently partnered on an integration between Teams and Facebook Workplace, while Slack and Teams have also long partnered around VoIP integrations.

“Microsoft Teams is akin to a Local Area Network, because Microsoft will always deliver messages between Microsoft users,” said Hadfield. “When a Teams user wants to send a message to a Slack user, it will go over the Wide Area Network for workplace communications. That’s what we’re building at Mio.”

Hadfield, who co-founded the company with CTO James Cundle, tells me that the team spent the last few years on addressing technical challenges like managing the basic differences between messaging clients (like Slack’s support for custom emoji) and how they handle channels, for example. Different platforms also place different limits on their users and their APIs are always in flux, too.

Image Credits: Mio

“The collaboration industry has come a long way from the ‘multi-headed clients’ like Trillian that connected AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo! Messenger in the early 2000s,” explained Hadfield. “A decade ago, there was a big push for open standards like XMPP and SIP, but the standards bodies failed to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation in team collaboration. Mio solves this by federating publicly available APIs, so each platform can innovate at their own pace.”

Given the obvious need for a service like this, it’s no surprise that there is a bit of competition here. Nextplane offers somewhat similar capabilities and with Matrix, there is an open source protocol for decentralized messaging with bridges to Slack, Discord and others (but not Teams, Zoom and Webex). “We plan to work closely with Matrix and Nextplane to advance our shared vision for a unified messaging ecosystem,” said Hadfield.

Mio plans to use the new funds to enhance its service by adding support for additional services like Google Chat, Meta’s Workplace and Symphony. The company also plans to launch a new unified presence feature that will allow users to synchronize their presence status across services.

“This investment, by two of the largest players in the collaboration industry, ushers in a new era for interoperability,” said Hadfield. “It brings us one step closer to ‘Collaboration Nirvana’ where everyone on the planet can collaborate with each other, regardless of which chat app they are using.”

More TechCrunch

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Over the past eight years,…

Fisker collapsed under the weight of its founder’s promises

What is AI? We’ve put together this non-technical guide to give anyone a fighting chance to understand how and why today’s AI works.

WTF is AI?

President Joe Biden has vetoed H.J.Res. 109, a congressional resolution that would have overturned the Securities and Exchange Commission’s current approach to banks and crypto. Specifically, the resolution targeted the…

President Biden vetoes crypto custody bill

Featured Article

Industries may be ready for humanoid robots, but are the robots ready for them?

How large a role humanoids will play in that ecosystem is, perhaps, the biggest question on everyone’s mind at the moment.

16 hours ago
Industries may be ready for humanoid robots, but are the robots ready for them?

VCs are clamoring to invest in hot AI companies, willing to pay exorbitant share prices for coveted spots on their cap tables. Even so, most aren’t able to get into…

VCs are selling shares of hot AI companies like Anthropic and xAI to small investors in a wild SPV market

The fashion industry has a huge problem: Despite many returned items being unworn or undamaged, a lot, if not the majority, end up in the trash. An estimated 9.5 billion…

Deal Dive: How (Re)vive grew 10x last year by helping retailers recycle and sell returned items

Tumblr officially shut down “Tips,” an opt-in feature where creators could receive one-time payments from their followers.  As of today, the tipping icon has automatically disappeared from all posts and…

You can no longer use Tumblr’s tipping feature 

Generative AI improvements are increasingly being made through data curation and collection — not architectural — improvements. Big Tech has an advantage.

AI training data has a price tag that only Big Tech can afford

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: Can we (and could we ever) trust OpenAI?

Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.

General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff

Featured Article

Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Live Nation says its Ticketmaster subsidiary was hacked. A hacker claims to be selling 560 million customer records.

2 days ago
Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Featured Article

Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

An autonomous pod. A solid-state battery-powered sports car. An electric pickup truck. A convertible grand tourer EV with up to 600 miles of range. A “fully connected mobility device” for young urban innovators to be built by Foxconn and priced under $30,000. The next Popemobile. Over the past eight years, famed vehicle designer Henrik Fisker…

2 days ago
Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

Late Friday afternoon, a time window companies usually reserve for unflattering disclosures, AI startup Hugging Face said that its security team earlier this week detected “unauthorized access” to Spaces, Hugging…

Hugging Face says it detected ‘unauthorized access’ to its AI model hosting platform

Featured Article

Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

Using stalkerware is creepy, unethical, potentially illegal, and puts your data and that of your loved ones in danger.

2 days ago
Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

The design brief was simple: each grind and dry cycle had to be completed before breakfast. Here’s how Mill made it happen.

Mill’s redesigned food waste bin really is faster and quieter than before

Google is embarrassed about its AI Overviews, too. After a deluge of dunks and memes over the past week, which cracked on the poor quality and outright misinformation that arose…

Google admits its AI Overviews need work, but we’re all helping it beta test

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. In…

Startups Weekly: Musk raises $6B for AI and the fintech dominoes are falling

The product, which ZeroMark calls a “fire control system,” has two components: a small computer that has sensors, like lidar and electro-optical, and a motorized buttstock.

a16z-backed ZeroMark wants to give soldiers guns that don’t miss against drones

The RAW Dating App aims to shake up the dating scheme by shedding the fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience. The app…

Pitch Deck Teardown: RAW Dating App’s $3M angel deck

Yes, we’re calling it “ThreadsDeck” now. At least that’s the tag many are using to describe the new user interface for Instagram’s X competitor, Threads, which resembles the column-based format…

‘ThreadsDeck’ arrived just in time for the Trump verdict

Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin confirmed on Friday that it had been the victim of a hack resulting in the theft of 4,502.9 bitcoin, or about $305 million.  According to…

Hackers steal $305M from DMM Bitcoin crypto exchange

This is not a drill! Today marks the final day to secure your early-bird tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 at a significantly reduced rate. At midnight tonight, May 31, ticket…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird prices end at midnight

Instagram is testing a way for creators to experiment with reels without committing to having them displayed on their profiles, giving the social network a possible edge over TikTok and…

Instagram tests ‘trial reels’ that don’t display to a creator’s followers

U.S. federal regulators have requested more information from Zoox, Amazon’s self-driving unit, as part of an investigation into rear-end crash risks posed by unexpected braking. The National Highway Traffic Safety…

Feds tell Zoox to send more info about autonomous vehicles suddenly braking

You thought the hottest rap battle of the summer was between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. You were wrong. It’s between Canva and an enterprise CIO. At its Canva Create event…

Canva’s rap battle is part of a long legacy of Silicon Valley cringe

Voice cloning startup ElevenLabs introduced a new tool for users to generate sound effects through prompts today after announcing the project back in February.

ElevenLabs debuts AI-powered tool to generate sound effects

We caught up with Antler founder and CEO Magnus Grimeland about the startup scene in Asia, the current tech startup trends in the region and investment approaches during the rise…

VC firm Antler’s CEO says Asia presents ‘biggest opportunity’ in the world for growth

Temu is to face Europe’s strictest rules after being designated as a “very large online platform” under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Chinese e-commerce marketplace Temu faces stricter EU rules as a ‘very large online platform’

Meta has been banned from launching features on Facebook and Instagram that would have collected data on voters in Spain using the social networks ahead of next month’s European Elections.…

Spain bans Meta from launching election features on Facebook, Instagram over privacy fears

Stripe, the world’s most valuable fintech startup, said on Friday that it will temporarily move to an invite-only model for new account sign-ups in India, calling the move “a tough…

Stripe curbs its India ambitions over regulatory situation