Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (commonly shortened to Zoom, and stylized as zoom) is an American communications technology company headquartered in San Jose, California. It provides videotelephony and online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform used for video communications (Meetings), messaging (Chat), voice calls (Phone), conference rooms for video meetings (Rooms), virtual events (Events) and contact centers (Contact Center), and offers an open platform allowing third-party developers to build custom applications on its unified communications platform (Developer Platform)

Eric Yuan, a former Cisco engineer and executive, founded Zoom in 2011, and launched its software in 2013 Zoom's revenue growth, and perceived ease-of-use and reliability of its software, resulted in a $1 billion valuation in 2017, making it a "unicorn" company. The company first became profitable in 2019, and completed an initial public offering that year The company joined the NASDAQ-100 stock index on April 30, 2020.

Beginning in early 2020, Zoom's software usage saw a remarkable global increase after quarantine measures were adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Its software products have faced public and media scrutiny related to security and privacy issues.

IPO and onward

On April 18, 2019, the company became a public company via an initial public offering. After pricing at US$36 per share, the share price increased over 72% on the first day of trading Prior to the IPO, Dropbox invested $5 million in Zoom.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, usage of Zoom increased due to an increase in remote work, distance education, which was used by thousands of schools, and online social relations. The company offered its services free to K–12 schools in many countries. By February 2020, Zoom had gained 2.22 million users in 2020 – more users than it amassed in the entirety of 2019. On one day in March 2020, the Zoom app was downloaded 2.13 million times. Daily meeting participants rose from about 10 million in December 2019 to more than 300 million daily meeting participants in April 2020.

On May 7, 2020, Zoom announced that it had acquired Keybase, a company specializing in end-to-end encryption. In June 2020, the company hired its first chief diversity officer, Damien Hooper-Campbell.

In July 2020, Zoom announced its first hardware as a service products, bundling its videoconferencing software with third-party hardware by DTEN, Neat, Poly, and Yealink, and running on the ServiceNow platform. It began with Zoom Rooms and Zoom Phone offerings, with those services available to US customers, who can acquire hardware from Zoom for a fixed monthly cost. On July 15, 2020, the company announced Zoom for Home, a line of products for home use, designed for remote workers. The first product, Zoom for Home - DTEN ME, includes software by Zoom and hardware by DTEN. It consists of a 27-inch screen with three wide-angle cameras and eight microphones, with Zoom software preloaded on the device. It became available in August 2020.

On July 3–4, using Zoom Webinar, the International Association of Constitutional Law organized the first "round-the-clock and round-the-globe" event that traveled through time zones, featuring 52 speakers from 28 countries. Soon after, a format of conferences which "virtually travel the globe with the sun from East to West",[62] became common, some of them running for several days.

In June 2021, Zoom acquired Kites (Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions), an artificial intelligence-based language translation company with an aim to reduce language barriers in video calls. In September 2021, Zoom's attempt to acquire contact center company Five9 for $14.7 billion was turned down by Five9's shareholders.

Quast, Jon (October 25, 2019).

"Can Zoom Make You...Happy? - The Motley Fool". The Motley Fool. Archived from the original on April 12, 2020. Retrieved April 29, 2020.