Zenzap raises $44M for an AI chat app built to replace WhatsApp at work

Guy Weiss’s Zenzap has raised $44 million in funding from investors including Bessemer, Lightspeed, and The Garage, along with individual investors Wix President Nir Zohar and former EY general manager Yoram Tietz. The round is notable because it’s the first time Weiss has raised outside capital in his career.

Weiss bootstrapped e-commerce marketing platform StuccoMedia in 2012 and sold it to Market Group in 2015, then spent a few years as an investor. He founded Zenzap in 2022 with co-founders Noam Neumann and Jonatan Bien after meeting Bessemer partner Adam Fisher. Weiss said he never intended to raise outside money, worried that a second round would read as failure after his first company’s success, and initially funded the idea himself before Fisher persuaded him that Zenzap would need venture capital to scale.

Zenzap is built for businesses — from hospitality and construction to healthcare and fast food — that currently rely on consumer chat apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or iMessage to coordinate with staff. “You can’t use WhatsApp or iMessage within a workplace with the AI agent on top of it because it doesn’t comply with IT. So that’s off the table. You can’t implement Slack and Microsoft Teams because they were not built for this day-to-day use case for mobile-first that is meant for average users,” Weiss said. The free tier includes group chats, direct messages, task management, calendar integration, schedule management, and AI-powered voice chat and search. Paid plans start at $51 per month for up to 20 users, adding voice and video calls, smart task sorting, task templates, higher file-storage limits, workspace-wide AI search, and the ability to turn messages into tasks; AI agents for workflow automation and voice/call transcription run on a separate credit-based pricing system.

Zenzap currently lists clients including FedEx, Dollar General, Taco Bell, Starbucks, Casey’s, and Regal; Weiss said franchise locations of chains like IHOP and McDonald’s often use the platform to coordinate shifts and supply. The startup employs 50 people across the U.S., Tel Aviv, and Europe, and wants to grow its product and R&D teams in the near future. Fisher said in an emailed statement that Zenzap’s broad reach beyond Slack’s largely developer-focused user base could work in its favor, arguing that most employees still rely on personal messaging apps at work and want a dedicated work agent of their own.

Why it matters

Zenzap is betting that frontline and non-developer workforces — largely untouched by Slack and Microsoft Teams — represent a bigger, underserved market for workplace AI messaging than the tech-industry niche those incumbents already own.