Deep Collaboration Platform CoScreen Launches with $4.6M in Seed Funding to Cure Video Chat Fatigue
CoScreen is enabling engineering teams at Okta, Publicis Sapient, Ripple and SAP to transform remote collaboration
Menlo Park, CA. March 25, 2021 - CoScreen, a radically different remote collaboration platform for engineers and other agile teams, launches today with a $4.6 million seed investment led by Unusual Ventures. Participating investors include early Figma and Dropbox investor John Lilly, GitHub CTO Jason Warner, and Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom. CoScreen was co-founded by CEO Till Pieper, previously a product manager at Google and SAP, CPO Max Andaker, who led technology innovation projects at Nestlé, and CTO Jason Thomas, an early engineering lead and architect at various video conferencing startups, including HireVue.
Remote teams often struggle to overcome misunderstandings, breakdowns in communication, and constant distractions. According to a report from The Information, Google's engineering teams reported record-high productivity pre-COVID. Three months into the shift to remote work, that number had dropped by 8% to just 31%. CoScreen combats this drop in remote team productivity by enabling multiple team members to simultaneously share and edit any application window. Instead of offering remote teams another channel to simply talk about work, CoScreen’s platform empowers agile teams to get work done together in real time.
“Popular workplace tools are designed to simulate in-person communication through video chat and messaging, but they aren’t optimized for remote engineering teams who need to tackle complex tasks together,” said Jason Thomas, CTO of CoScreen. “We understand firsthand the unique challenges agile teams face, and designed CoScreen to make synchronous, complex teamwork easier through deep collaboration.”
Initially developed as part of a corporate skunkworks project, CoScreen goes beyond basic chat and passive screen-sharing. It allows remote teams to discuss, edit, and demo their work simultaneously on a joint desktop, making tasks like onboarding, code reviews, and solving service outages easier than ever. CoScreen users can edit each other's shared windows as if they were their own.
CoScreen also helps protect user privacy with safeguards to prevent accidental window-sharing and sharing confidential notifications unlike other screen-sharing tools. The platform’s high-quality audio and video chat features allow users to communicate naturally while working on engineering projects together.
“CoScreen has been an astonishingly useful introduction into our onboarding and orientation process, as well as within our internal team discussions and brainstorming sessions,” said Ryan Robson, technical training manager at cPanel.
“We’ve been able to maintain synchronization with all trainees as they progress through the exercises, identifying hurdles and issues as they occur, which has improved the efficiency and overall experience of the training substantially. I’m thoroughly impressed with the capabilities of this application, and I look forward to seeing CoScreen continue to grow.”
CoScreen integrates with existing tools like Slack and Google Calendar, and thanks to an enterprise-grade architecture, the platform enables teams worldwide to connect through a network of thousands of servers. Today, CoScreen is used by teams at Okta, Publicis Sapient, Ripple, and SAP for daily engineering workflows. The platform’s first public beta release is available on macOS and Windows today and is free to use for the next three months.
“The mass migration to remote work environments initiated by the pandemic has created a tremendous opportunity to better serve the needs of distributed teams that rely on technology platforms, not just for communication but to bring new levels of efficiency and engagement to virtual collaboration,” said John Vrionis, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Unusual Ventures.
“We’re confident that CoScreen’s seamless platform combined with the founding team’s deep enterprise experience will soon make it the favorite tool of remote engineering teams.”
About CoScreen
CoScreen is a radically different remote collaboration platform for engineers and other agile teams. The desktop application is designed to support synchronous, complex teamwork that calls for deep collaboration. CoScreen goes beyond simple remote communication, instead empowering agile teams to get work done together. The platform allows multiple users to share windows and edit them simultaneously as if they were on the same desktop, integrated with crystal-clear audio and video chat.
Founded by Google, SAP, Nestlé and video conferencing veterans, CoScreen is already being used by teams at Okta, Publicis Sapient, and Ripple, and remote teams around the world. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, CoScreen is backed by Unusual Ventures, SAP, John Lilly (early Dropbox & Figma investor), Jason Warner (CTO of GitHub), Anthony Goldbloom (CEO of Kaggle), Tim Chen (Essence VC), Ellen Levy, Elizabeth and Kevin Weil, and a range of other investors.
To learn more, visit https://www.coscreen.co.
Media Contacts
May Lauren Arad
may@coscreen.co
Resources
CoScreen website:
https://www.coscreen.co
Explainer video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3gltVKtxcM
Customer testimonials:
https://coscreen.co/customers
Images & photos: