Blackboard founder turns Zoom add-on designed for teachers into professional tool

When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a friend came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online class organization tool. His original company was acquired for $1.64 billion in 2011. Chasen then developed Class, a Zoom add-on, during the pandemic to help teachers better use Zoom in the classroom, which they got hard to do at the start of the pandemic.

But Chasen says people who used Class kept telling him they needed something similar for business, and on Thursday, Class announced the release of ProFeatures for Zoom, designed specifically for business users.

Instead of simply sharing a single screen where a single participant has control, ProFeatures allows everyone to edit a document in Microsoft Office or Google Docs, brainstorm on a Miro whiteboard, or edit code together in Microsoft Visual Studio, to name just a few examples. If the SaaS tool you want is not part of the default toolset, there is a built-in browser to access any website or application.

Additionally, you can open multiple tabs, allowing people to share multiple screens instead of just the presenter.

“I’ve had all these clients say, ‘Hey, I’d love to use this for my regular meetings.’ So I asked my developers to take our product, turn off the learning tools and leave the fundamental improvements we made to Zoom,” Chasen told TechCrunch.

While Class was doing well — the company raised $164 million, per Crunchbase — Chasen saw an opportunity to grow his business. “So now we have two products. We have Class for Zoom and Class for Microsoft Teams. And now we also have ProFeatures for Zoom,” he said.

He had already managed to sell $17 million worth of ProFeatures enterprise licenses, before he even officially had a product, so he knew he was on the right track. Individual users can use it for free, but the power comes when multiple people in the meeting use the advanced features.

The money comes from an enterprise license, which provides enterprise features like centralized IT control, single sign-on and other things an IT department needs to control usage in a large organization.

But Chasen says he discovered the tool had a viral quality. “We actually have something really interesting, which is the viral marketing that we’re doing, and no one has done it yet. So if you join a meeting, let’s say you’re with 10 other people in standard Zoom, but you have Pro features, when you share a document, everyone gets a message from you saying, “Hey, I’m sharing this Word document.” . You can only view it in Zoom with screen sharing. But if you had ProFeatures, you could modify it. Click here to download ProFeatures,” he said.

If you don’t want to share the ability to edit with the entire group, you can limit who can see it or what participants can do, such as view, edit, or comment. Additionally, you can choose to revoke these permissions after the meeting ends.

Finally, there is an AI component, the ProFeatues AI Assistant, which can transcribe the meeting as well as capture all documents, files and web pages shared during the meeting – and it can answer questions about anything that was discussed at the meeting, including documents. and shared web pages.

ProFeatures is available from Class starting today.