Howard Lerman is tired of sitting in Zoom meetings.
The former Yext CEO has spent over a year creating Roam, a new kind of virtual office software that allows employees to communicate less formally and more efficiently.
Roam functions like an office building in the cloud, and a beta version of the platform launched Wednesday morning. Employees appear in virtual rooms or “offices,” and people can drop by at the click of a button — much like they can stop by a physical office space.
Employees have a bird’s-eye view of their “floor” in a Roam HQ. People can see who is in each virtual room as well as who is working remotely, who is in a physical office and who is in the field. Some rooms have audio-only capabilities, and some have options for both video and audio, like a traditional videoconference.
Lerman told CNBC that Roam can bring all their employees to one place, even if companies operate remotely in offices around the globe or use a hybrid model. And by giving employees easy access to their co-workers, companies can dedicate less time to formal meetings.
“What we are seeing is companies that use the cloud HQ in Roam see an average meeting time of about 8 minutes and 30 seconds, which is staggering, because for me previously, my average meeting times were 30 and 60 minutes,” he said.
A floor map in a Roam HQ.
Courtesy: Roam
Lerman was inspired to found Roam after he accidentally forgot to invite a co-worker to a large Zoom call, he said. He realized there was no way for an outsider to tell that people were meeting, so he decided to create a platform that gives employees more visibility.
If a company needs to hold an all-hands meeting or watch a staffwide presentation, they can send employees to a room that mimics a theater and has the capacity to hold thousands of people at a time.
Companies can customize their HQ to fit their needs by creating floor plans, choosing who “sits” where and determining the number of “floors” they need. Employees can also make the platform their own by adding profile pictures and customizing a “shelf” in their office with photos.
Lerman has even customized his own entrance music.
“It’s very important when you’re running a big company to have your own entrance music,” he said.
Employees can enter a theater in Roam to attend company-wide meetings and presentations.
Courtesy: Roam
Lerman raised $30 million in Series A funding in partnership with Jules Maltz at IVP, according to a release. He also contributed $10.6 million of his own money, bringing Roam’s fundraising total to $40.6 million.
Lerman said in the release that he looks forward to partnering with Maltz and IVP for a second time.
Roam’s pricing model is going to be usage-based, he said, which means it will only charge for active users in a month.
“I think it’s much more company friendly to do it that way,” Lerman said.
Companies can use Roam on an invite-only basis during the beta period, and Lerman said there is a waitlist. Roam will strive to add about a dozen companies a month to the platform for the next six months.
“What you see today is like a 1.0,” Lerman said. “We have a pretty big vision ahead.”
Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said Tuesday that while demand for computing power is “tremendous,” the production of artificial intelligence data centers will eventually top out.
“I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that,” Dell said on “Closing Bell: Overtime.”
The hardware maker’s server networking business grew 58% last year and was up 69% last quarter, Dell said. As large language models have evolved to more multimodal and multi-agent systems, the demand for AI processing power and capacity has continued to be strong.
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Dell’s AI servers are powered by Nvidia‘s Blackwell Ultra chips. The company then sells its devices to customers like cloud service provider CoreWeave and xAI, Elon Musk’s startup.
Dell shares rose over 3% Tuesday after increasing its expected long-term revenue and profit growth in an analyst meeting.
The computer maker raised its expected annual revenue growth to 7% to 9%, up from its previous target of 3% to 4%, with diluted earnings per share now expected to be 15% higher, up from its previous 8% target.
The company reported strong second-quarter earnings in August, and said it planned to ship $20 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026. That is double what it sold last year.
The Motion Picture Association on Monday urged OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” against its new video creation model Sora 2, which is being used to produce content that it says is infringing on copyrighted media.
Following the Sora app’s rollout last week, users have been swarming the platform with AI-generated clips featuring characters from popular shows and brands.
“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified in a blog post that the company will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how their characters are used.
But Rivkin said that OpenAI “must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service,” and that “well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.
Although OpenAI previously held an opt-out system, which placed the burden on studios to request that characters not appear on Sora, Altman’s follow-up blog post said the platform was changing to an opt-in model, suggesting that Sora would not allow the usage of copyrighted characters without permission.
However, Altman noted that the company may not be able to prevent all IP from being misused.
“There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration,” Altman wrote.
Copyright concerns have emerged as a major issue during the generative AI boom.
Disney and Universal sued AI image creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their films and disregarded requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo said that valuations for artificial intelligence companies are “at a bubble,” comparing it to the dotcom era.
But one key difference in the market now, he said, is that large companies with “healthy balance sheets” are financing AI businesses.
Bravo’s private equity firm boasts more than $181 billion in assets under management as of June, and focuses on buying and selling enterprise tech companies, with a significant chunk of its portfolio invested in cybersecurity.
Bravo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday that investors can’t value a $50 million annual recurring revenue company at $10 billion.
“That company is going to have to produce a billion dollars in free cash flow to double an investor’s money, ultimately,” he said. “Even if the product is right, even if the market’s right, that’s a tall order, managerially.”
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OpenAI recently finalized a secondary share sale that would value the ChatGPT-maker at $500 billion. The company is projected to make $13 billion in revenue for 2025.
Nvidia recently said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, in part, to help the ChatGPT maker lease its chips and build out supercomputing facilities in the coming years.
Other public companies have soared on AI promises, with Palantir’s market cap climbing to $437 billion, putting it among the 20 most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S., and AppLovin now worth $213 billion.
Even early-stage valuations are massive in AI, with Thinking Machines Lab notching a $12 billion valuation on a $2 billion seed round.
Despite the inflated numbers, Bravo emphasized that there’s a “big difference” between the dotcom collapse and the current landscape of AI.
“Now you have some really big companies and some big balance sheets and healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which is different than what happened roughly 25 years ago,” he said.