Loom was founded in 2015 by Joe Thomas, Shahed Khan, and Vinay Hiremath in San Francisco. Originally called OpenTest, the company rebranded to Loom and found its niche in async video communication. In October 2023, Atlassian acquired Loom for $975 million.
The concept is simple but effective: click record, capture your screen and/or camera, and share a link. Recipients watch on their own time. It eliminates meetings that could have been a video message and makes explanations clearer than text alone. Loom calls it “async video” — communication that’s richer than text but doesn’t require everyone to be available at the same time.
Over 25 million people across 350,000 companies have used Loom. It’s popular for product demos, bug reports, code walkthroughs, design feedback, onboarding tutorials, and status updates. The product is especially valuable for remote and distributed teams spread across time zones.
Loom offers features like transcripts, chapters, comments at specific timestamps, emoji reactions, viewer analytics, and the ability to trim and edit recordings. AI features include automatic summaries and titles for recordings. Under Atlassian, Loom integrates with Jira, Confluence, and the broader Atlassian ecosystem. The company’s growth accelerated during the pandemic, and the behavior it created — recording quick videos instead of scheduling meetings — has stuck around. For many teams, “just send a Loom” has become standard practice.
