Acapela: New Meeting Platform Aims to Solve Zoom Fatigue

Acapela, a recently established company co-founded by Dubsmash creator Roland Grenke, is publicly launching today with the intention of reimagining online meetings for distributed teams.

The product is designed to address the growing issue of video conferencing exhaustion and is characterized as an “asynchronous meeting platform.” Grenke and Acapela’s other co-founder, Heiki Riesenkampf – a former Google employee with expertise in deep learning computer science – contend that this approach could be instrumental in fostering improved and more productive teamwork. In many respects, the platform represents a contrast to the drawbacks of real-time interaction and the attention demands associated with tools like Zoom and Slack.

To mark its launch, the Berlin-based and “remote-first” organization has secured €2.5 million in funding. Visionaries Club spearheaded the investment round, with additional contributions from a variety of angel investors, notably Christian Reber (the founder of Pitch and Wunderlist) and Taavet Hinrikus (the founder of TransferWise). Furthermore, Entrepreneur First is also an investor and has appointed EF venture partner Benedict Evans to focus on this area. His recent analyses regarding a future beyond Zoom provide context for this involvement.

Specifically, Acapela plans to allocate the new capital to expanding its core team, with a focus on product development, design, and engineering as it continues to refine its offerings.

“Our goal is to enable remote teams to collaborate more effectively through fewer, but more impactful, meetings,” Grenke explains. “Acapela aims to establish a new category of team collaboration that offers greater structure and a more personal touch than text-based communication (such as Slack or email), while also providing more flexibility than video conferencing solutions (like Zoom or Google Meet).”

Grenke posits that asynchronous meetings offer a solution, allowing participants to contribute without the need for real-time interaction, yet still maintaining an agenda, defined objectives, a completion timeframe, and – when successful – clear, actionable results.

“Rather than spending hours in video calls daily, users can integrate their calendars and identify meetings they wish to discuss asynchronously,” he elaborates. “This means, instead of requiring everyone to be present simultaneously, team members can contribute to discussions with greater flexibility over time. Similar to consumer communication applications, Acapela supports the use of rich media formats, such as voice or video messages, to convey opinions, and integrates seamlessly with existing productivity applications (including GSuite, Atlassian, Asana, Trello, Notion, and others).”

Moreover, Acapela will leverage advanced machine learning technologies to automate routine meeting tasks and to summarize meeting content and resulting decisions. Successful implementation of these features could prove highly valuable.

“Initially, we are focusing on rapidly growing technology companies that are open to adopting new tools and are experiencing an increasing need for improved processes as their teams expand,” the Acapela founder adds. “These companies also typically have a technically proficient, globally distributed workforce across multiple time zones, making synchronous communication particularly challenging. Looking ahead, we see significant potential in extending our reach to SMEs and larger enterprises, as the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the trend toward decentralized workforces even in more traditional industries. These companies represent over 90% of the European market, and many have yet to embrace new communication tools.”