Aircall has raised $2.75 Million led by Balderton Capital for their self-service phone number management system for businesses, the company announced this week. Working with companies like Uber & Deliveroo, Aircall integrates with a wide range of business applications- Zendesk, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Slack – as the company seeks to make it increasingly easier for companies to scale up their telephony operations across multiple countries.
In a word, Aircall makes it super easy to create a phone number, to manage who gets called at that number, and on what device. When they first launched on stage at #ParisFounders last year, I had all but called the company dead in the water after rumors surfaced that the founding CTO had left before the product got off the ground. As a product, Aircall has remained steady in its growth over the past 18 months, with the team already up to 15 people, including two in their San Francisco office after they completed 500Startups last year.
In addition to participation by FundersClub, this round was led by Balderton Capitals’ Bernard Liautaud, who has been characterized by his peers as taking his time on investments, and then committing himself fully to them. Liautaud saw one of his first investments, Sunrise, exit last year in a €100 Million sale to Balderton, meanwhile active portfolio companies like Sketchfab, Dashlane, Qubit, Talend, Vestiaire Collective, Citymapper & Scytl continue to show themselves as fund leaders for Balderton, making Liautaud’s portfolio one of most rich of any of the partners.
With his stamp of approval on Aircall, expect rigorous attention from Liautaud’s part, who hasn’t made many new investments in 2015 as he focused on his existing portfolio. Aircall has proven that fast-growing digital companies will use their service, and founder & CEO Olivier Pailhes tells me that, while companies like Uber & Deliveroo start using their service locally (that is, in the Paris team), satisfaction quickly leads (and has led) to them using it across multiple offices, showing that Aircall can grow inside a team from the bottom up, like Slack or Dashlane.
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