Multi Remote Collaboration

Multi began life in 2019 as Remotion, founded by Alex Embiricos (CEO) and Charley Ho (CTO/co-founder). Embiricos, a Stanford-trained mechanical engineer and computer scientist, had been a product manager at Dropbox and a summer associate consultant at Boston Consulting Group; Ho, also a Stanford graduate (BS, Electrical Engineering with a software focus), had worked as a software engineer at Google before co-founding the company. The founders were themselves distributed early on (Embiricos in Brooklyn, Ho in Chicago), which informed the product's thesis: remote teams needed a lightweight way to have spontaneous, camera-on conversations rather than relying on constant typed messaging or heavily scheduled video meetings, and without resorting to always-on 'surveillance' style office cameras.

Remotion launched its beta on October 6, 2020, as a macOS desktop app featuring a taskbar of coworkers' profile pictures and live availability status, letting users start an instant video chat by hovering and clicking, with Google Calendar integration for scheduled meetings. Alongside the beta launch, the company disclosed it had raised a combined $13 million, comprising a seed round led by First Round Capital and a Series A led by Greylock (with then-Greylock general partner Sarah Guo leading that investment), per TechCrunch's October 2020 report. Crunchbase also lists Musha Ventures and WndrCo among the company's investors. Crunchbase's listing of Hamze Ghalebi (Paris-based, previously linked to the analytics startup Narrator) as a 'CEO/co-founder' of Multi/Remotion could not be corroborated by TechCrunch's coverage (both its 2020 seed/Series A story and its 2024 acquisition story name only Embiricos and Ho as founders), so this entry is treated as an unverified/likely data-quality issue in Crunchbase rather than fact and Ghalebi is omitted from the founders list here.

At some point after 2020 (exact date not independently confirmed via primary sources available), Remotion rebranded to Multi and evolved its product to emphasize simultaneous multi-person screen sharing (up to 10 participants), shared app control, and automatic deep-linking into code, design files, and documents — positioning it more explicitly as a 'virtual office' / co-working tool for distributed engineering and product teams, competing conceptually with video/communication incumbents like Zoom, Microsoft (Teams), and Slack (per Crunchbase's listed competitors). Total disclosed lifetime funding remained $13 million per Crunchbase data cited in TechCrunch's 2024 acquisition story, suggesting no additional priced rounds were announced after the original seed/Series A, though Crunchbase's own funding-round table (paywalled) shows two rounds both oddly labeled 'Series A,' which may reflect a data-entry artifact rather than a second bona fide Series A.

Business model

B2B SaaS desktop application sold to distributed/remote technology teams for real-time video collaboration and multi-person screen sharing.

Subscription (team/seat-based SaaS), consistent with its positioning as a workplace video/collaboration tool; specific pricing not independently confirmed.