When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a friend came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom management tool. His original company was acquired for $1.64 billion in 2011. Chasen later grew Classa Zoom plugin, during the pandemic to help teachers make better use of Zoom in a classroom, which they struggled to do at the beginning of the pandemic.
But Chasen says people using Class kept telling him they needed something similar for business, and on Thursday Class announced its launch Profeatures for Zoomdesigned specifically for professional users.
Instead of just sharing a screen where only one participant is in control, ProFeatures allows everyone to edit a document in Microsoft Office or Google Docs, brainstorm on a Miro board, or edit code together in Microsoft Visual Studio, as some examples. If the SaaS tool you want isn’t part of the default toolset, there’s a built-in browser to access any website or app.
Additionally, you can have multiple tabs open, allowing users to share multiple screens instead of just the presenter.
“I had all these customers saying, ‘Hey, I’d like to use this for my regular meetings.’ So I had my developers take our product, turn off the learning tools, and just leave the fundamental improvements we made to Zoom,” Chasen told TechCrunch.
While Class has been doing well — the company has raised $164 million, per Crunchbase — Chasen saw an opportunity to expand his business. “So we have two products now. We have Class for Zoom and Class for Microsoft Teams. And now we also have ProFeatures for Zoom,” he said.
He was already able to sell $17 million worth of ProFeatures enterprise licenses even before he officially had a product, so he knew he was on to something. Individual users can use it for free, but the power comes when many people in the meeting use the advanced features.
The money comes from an enterprise license, which provides business features like centralized control for IT, single sign-on, and other things an IT department needs to control usage across a large organization.
But Chasen says he’s found the tool has a viral quality. “We actually have something very interesting, which is viral marketing that we do, and no one has done it yet. So if you join a meeting, let’s say you’re with 10 other people on regular Zoom, but you have Pro features, when you share a document, everyone gets a message from you that says, “Hey, I’m sharing this Word document. You can only see it in Zoom with screen sharing. But if you had ProFeatures, you could edit it. Click here to download ProFeatures,” he said.
If you don’t want to share the edit feature with the entire group, you can limit who can see it or what participants can do, such as view, edit, or comment. Additionally, you may choose to revoke these permissions after the meeting ends.
Finally, there is an AI component, ProFeatues AI Assistant, which can transcribe the meeting as well as record all documents, files and web pages shared in the meeting — and can answer questions about everything discussed in the meeting, including shared documents and web pages.
Profeatures is available from the course starting today.
