Many virtual meetings grow tedious due to screen-sharing problems, tab toggling, or too much face staring. Serial entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi decided to dream up something closer to real work life: a cloud-based platform with meeting “rooms” that simultaneously display all the web-based apps and files your team needs for real-time collaboration (and then remembers them for the next meeting with the same group). No more sending URLs through chat boxes: Switchboard goes well beyond the videoconferencing and communication tools offered by Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. The interactive workspace allows everyone to do more than talk or listen—each cursor has a name attached. The “platform allows people to do things together as if they were sitting side-by-side,” says Ashkenazi, CEO of Switchboard. After the product launched in July, investors were so impressed they plowed $25 million into it.
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