InterCall, the world’s largest conferencing provider, is to give each of their 1 million customers an account with Huddle, the UK startup which has built a suite of social collaboration applications. – which were good enough to make it the only non-US partner for LinkedIn recently, alongside the likes of Amazon and Google. Huddle is still running on a $4 million Series A round from 2007 from Eden Ventures, but revenues are coming in at the same time.
InterCall conferencing customers can now schedule phone and web meetings in Huddle and share dial-in details, documents and meeting minutes. In addition, they will benefit from Huddle’s full range of project management and collaboration tools including discussions, whiteboards, tasks and document versioning and audit trail. The deal is a big one for Huddle – InterCall has around 30-40,000 new businesses joining them every month.
It’s interesting to note that Scott Etzler, InterCall’s president says “Many of our customers are already familiar with Huddle from LinkedIn and Facebook.” That indicates thay Huddle is shaping up to be a truly internationally recognised startup – something that doesn’t happen often enough in the UK. Alastair Mitchell, Huddle co-founder and CEO, says the deal is a natural fit and “realises our vision of end-to-end collaboration and social networking for business, in one place.”
Huddle’s main advantage is that teams can collaborate in a secure, VPN-like environment from any computer allowing them to avoid FTP servers and eliminate USBs and CDs. Customers now include Boots, P&G, Barclaycard and UNICEF and a number of UK and US government departments.