Highfive

Highfive emerged in the video conferencing market, founded in 2012 by Shan Sinha and Jeremy Roy. The company officially launched in 2014, aiming to simplify meeting room collaboration with an integrated hardware and software solution. Sinha, previously the co-founder and CEO of DocuSign, and Roy, a former product leader at Google, brought significant enterprise software and product development experience to the venture. Their vision for Highfive was born from the frustration with the complexity and high cost of existing video conferencing systems.

The company's core offering was an all-in-one device that combined a high-definition camera, microphones, and a CPU, which could be placed on any TV to turn it into a video conferencing endpoint. This hardware was tightly integrated with its cloud-based software, enabling features like one-click meeting starts from a calendar, wireless screen sharing from laptops via WebRTC, and seamless joining from mobile devices. Highfive targeted mid-market companies that needed a scalable and user-friendly communication tool without the hefty price tag and IT overhead associated with traditional systems from providers like Cisco or Polycom. The business model was primarily subscription-based, bundling the hardware and software for a monthly per-room fee, which was a departure from the industry standard of large upfront hardware costs.

In a significant market development, Dialpad, a cloud communications platform, acquired Highfive in September 2020. This strategic acquisition allowed Dialpad to integrate Highfive's video conferencing technology into its unified communications suite, creating a more comprehensive offering that included voice, messaging, and video. The Highfive team and technology were absorbed into Dialpad, effectively marking the end of Highfive as a standalone entity.

Keywords: video conferencing, hardware, software as a service, unified communications, meeting room technology, collaboration tools, enterprise communication, WebRTC, Dialpad acquisition, cloud-based