The Async Video Market Is Consolidating. Here Is Who Survives.
Loom set the category. Atlassian bought it. Now the rest of the async video market is splitting into winners and walking dead.
Screen recording is a feature, not a product
We think the async video market is about to collapse, and most of the companies in it don't see it coming.
Screen recording is a feature, not a product. The standalone value proposition ("record your screen and share a link") is easily replicated. What matters is where the recording lives after you make it. Loom recordings live inside Atlassian. Vidyard recordings live inside HubSpot and Salesforce. If your recordings live in a standalone app that nobody checks, they don't get watched.
In 2024, async video was a crowded category. Loom, Vidyard, Claap, Tella, mmhmm, Sendspark, Berrycast, Hippo Video, Zight, Volley, and a dozen others were all competing for the "record your screen and send it to someone" use case.
Two years later, the field has thinned. Atlassian acquired Loom for $975 million in October 2023 and spent 2024-2025 integrating it into Confluence and Jira. That acquisition did two things: it validated the category and it killed the "beat Loom" strategy for everyone else. You cannot out-Loom Loom when Loom is bundled with the tools 200,000+ companies already use.
Why consolidation is happening
Distribution wins. Our read is that the next 18 months will be decided by distribution, not features. Loom has Atlassian. Vidyard has the Salesforce/HubSpot ecosystem. Everyone else is selling to individuals who can get screen recording for free from their OS.
AI compressed the feature gap. In 2023, Loom's AI summaries and auto-chapters were a differentiator. By 2026, every tool has them. Tella, Claap, and even free tools like ScreenPal offer AI-generated titles, summaries, and transcripts. When everyone has the same features, distribution and pricing determine the winner.
Budgets tightened. Async video tools are a discretionary purchase. They are the first line item cut when finance asks "what can we cancel?" A $15/user/month tool that saves 30 minutes per week is hard to justify when Loom offers a generous free tier and Zoom Clips is included in existing Zoom licenses.
The market map
We think the market splits into three tiers. This is an editorial call, not a ranking. If you're evaluating tools in this space, our piece on replacing meetings with async workflows covers the practical side.
Loom (Atlassian). Dominant. 25+ million users, bundled with Jira and Confluence, free tier that covers most individual users. The integration play makes it sticky in ways standalone tools cannot match.
Vidyard. Surviving by owning the sales use case. If your async video is a sales prospecting tool (personalized video emails, CRM tracking, viewer analytics), Vidyard is the answer. They are not trying to be a general-purpose screen recorder anymore. They are a sales tool that happens to record video.
Claap. The European alternative. Strong in France and Germany where data residency matters. Their pivot toward meeting recording + async video in one product is smart because it doubles the surface area where they are useful.
Who is at risk
We'll be direct. Berrycast, ScreenPal, and Zight are running on borrowed time. None have the distribution or differentiation to survive what's coming.
General-purpose screen recorders without a niche. If your only value proposition is "record your screen and share a link," you are competing with free tiers from Loom, Zoom Clips, and built-in OS tools (macOS Screen Recording, Windows Snipping Tool with video). The standalone market for basic screen recording is collapsing to zero.
Tools without enterprise distribution. Berrycast, ScreenPal, Zight, and others that sell to individuals and small teams face the hardest path. Individual users default to free. Small teams default to whatever their company already pays for. Without an enterprise sales motion or a platform integration, the funnel narrows every quarter.
Video messaging tools without AI differentiation. Sendspark and Hippo Video built on personalized video for sales outreach. That use case is real but niche. As Vidyard owns the sales video category and email clients start supporting native video, the standalone "video email" play gets squeezed.
Where this ends
By end of 2027, the async video market has three players: Loom (bundled with Atlassian), Vidyard (owns the sales use case), and maybe Claap (if the European enterprise bet pays off). Everyone else gets acqui-hired or shuts down.
We think mmhmm's $100M raise looks like a rounding error against Atlassian's distribution. We think Volley and Yac's "async meetings" positioning was a dead end from the start. We think Berrycast and ScreenPal will quietly disappear, and nobody will notice for six months.
If you're choosing an async video tool today, start with what you already pay for. If your company uses Atlassian, Loom is the default. If you use HubSpot or Salesforce for sales, Vidyard is the default. If you are in Europe and care about GDPR data residency, look at Claap. Don't bet your workflows on a tool that might not exist in 18 months.