Cloud-based video conferencing company Zoom was founded in 2011 by former engineers from Cisco and WebEx. After Zoom launched their video conferencing software to the public in February 2013, they quickly attracted over 20,000 businesses and 1,400 educational institutions globally.

In the beginning, their growth was organic, with technology companies and higher education as early adopters, happily embracing Zoom technology.

According to Janelle Raney, Product Marketing for Zoom, “Freemium has always been a big engine,” driving conversions to paid accounts. Since Zoom is a collaborative platform, it naturally lends itself to viral growth—every time you invite someone new to a meeting, they get to know Zoom (and to know Zoom, is to love Zoom!).

But word-of-mouth growth can only take a company so far. As Zoom grew up, they needed to be more strategic about their growth. To do this, they needed the right foundation.

As they moved upmarket, their existing billing system was not supporting their customers’ needs. They had no quoting solution and were relying on inefficient MS Word docs and spreadsheets. According to Sunil Madan, Head of Business Operations for Zoom, “It was going to get out of control” and was completely unscalable.

To work with mid-market and enterprise customers, they needed more: more customization, more reporting, different plans, easy discounting. And big logos had unique requirements which Zoom’s former billing system couldn’t support. So they went looking for a platform solution to help them mature as a company.

Enter Zuora.

In 2015, Zoom implemented Zuora in just four months. Since that time, they’ve experienced exponential growth and received numerous industry kudos alongside an additional huge funding round from Sequoia that places Zoom at a $1B valuation.

In short, Zuora is supporting Zoom’s growth by providing:

• Pricing and packaging flexibility which allows Zoom to design customized product editions engineered to increase deals and ACV per deal.
• Deep insight into customer usage to help identify upsell opportunities and build strategic upsell paths.
• Support for online account management and a range of online payment methods for self-service customers—both of which are essential to drive customer satisfaction, conversions, and upgrades.
• An enterprise multi-entity version of Zuora which is key to their planned international expansion: a strategic priority for Zoom.

As a result of their awesome product and strategic growth, customers, journalists, and analysts alike all laud Zoom’s services. In November 2016, Zoom announced 215% year-over-year growth in usage and was named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing (according to Raney, the Zuora infrastructure was a “definite factor” in this award).  And in January 2017, they raised $100M in Series D funding and Okta announced Zoom as the fastest growing app on their platform.

Zoom is growing fast, with demands from sales and marketing, billing, operations, and finance that they need to stay ahead of—not to mention the over 650,000 companies who put their trust in Zoom. In response to this high demand, according to Madan, “The biggest advantage Zuora gives Zoom? The speed to deliver.”