We are delighted to announce that we are leading a series B funding round in cloud voice SaaS platform, Aircall. With an ambition to be the phone system of every SME globally, Aircall provides an easy to set up, flexible, scalable and open platform to an SME market worth $10bn in the U.S. alone.
In a recent survey of customer-care executives, 57% considered call reduction their number one priority over the next five years. Yet according to a recent survey by Accenture, 83% of U.S. customers prefer conversing with individuals, rather than reading emails or responding to digital posts. Despite the rise of new customer facing technologies, such as chatbots or email systems, customers are still choosing to connect to businesses through the phone. Despite the hype, far from being silenced, customer call centres are getting nosier.
While technology does have the potential to reduce the number of calls a business receives, it also, perhaps more importantly, has the potential to make those calls more useful. Calls are not just a way for customers to connect, they are also a source of intelligence for the business. Yet research shows that 52% of call centres don’t share customer intelligence with other departments within their company.
Driven by the access companies now have to cloud technologies, business tools have been redefined to enable collaboration and flexibility. But the phone has not been one of them. Meanwhile, SaaS companies have traditionally lacked the agility to serve small businesses who require more intuitive solutions to enable seamless connectivity.
Re-imagining customer experience: welcome Aircall
We are delighted to announce that we are leading a series B funding round in cloud voice SaaS platform, Aircall. With an ambition to be the phone system of every SME globally, Aircall provides an easy to set up, flexible, scalable and open platform to an SME market worth $10bn in the U.S. alone.
This series B funding, totalling $29m, joins together fellow firms Balderton, NextWorld Capital, and Newfund, bringing total funding to-date to $40.5m. Aircall will use the funds to drive forward the buildout of its platform and acquire world-class talent to complement its growing teams in the U.S. and Europe.
Founded in mid-2014 by Olivier Pailhes (ex BCG), and incubated by 500 start-ups, the company empowers sales and support teams to track every call with a phone system specifically built for their favourite business tools. In fact, its solution is so simple to get started, it takes just ten minutes to set up.
Since its inception, thousands of businesses have turned to Aircall to improve their communications. The platform replaces outdated systems with a collaborative and efficient solution that provides relevant customer data and agent-facing tools at the onset of every call.
After enjoying an upwards trajectory through strategic partnerships and strong customer adoption, Aircall has grown from handling thousands to millions of daily calls.
We very much look forward to working with Olivier and the Aircall team as they continue to build on the success achieved to date.