BlueJeans folds
Verizon dropped hundreds of millions on BlueJeans at the height of the pandemic lockdowns. Three years and some change later, the lesser-known video-conferencing app is done for, the telecom giant told users today.
In a mass email, Verizon wrote that it “made the difficult decision to sunset our suite of BlueJeans products.” 9to5Google first reported the news. (Verizon is TechCrunch’s former parent company.)
Verizon added that it chose to kill the B2B app “due to the changing market landscape.” That changing landscape has everything to do with Zoom, which dominated the COVID-19 video-conferencing boom and lives on as a prominent service for businesses, alongside competitors such as Google Hangouts. Yet, even Zoom isn’t trading anywhere near its October 2020 peak.
BlueJeans was founded in 2011 by former chief technology officer Alagu Periyannan and former CEO and head of product Krish Ramakrishnan. Within two years of the Verizon deal going through, both co-founders left — as did Ramakrishnan’s successor, former CEO Quentin Gallivan, along with former CFO Robert Park.
The first BlueJeans features to go, as of August 31, will be its basic and free trial tiers. A member of BlueJeans’ support staff told TechCrunch by phone that the service will continue to operate normally for other users until at least December 2023.
For now, the BlueJeans website still reads, “Nothing fits better than BlueJeans. Meet for as long as you want. Forever.”
