Meet Aircall, a French startup specializing in creating a modern platform for your phone support needs. The company started as an easy way to create a virtual number that would ring your support team’s phones one by one until someone picked up the phone. It is now a complete yet easy-to-use phone solution for support teams that you manage from your computer.
“We launched a desktop and Chrome app that acts as a virtual phone,” co-founder and CEO Olivier Pailhès told me. “We worked a lot on collaboration features. We have a shared inbox for the entire team, a shared address book and more.”
Until recently, most of Aircall’s clients had been small French companies that just need to handle a few calls per day. But Aircall started working with bigger companies who rely a lot on their phone support, such as on-demand chef service La Belle Assiette.
“This handful of clients manage between 5 and 15 numbers, with 10 or 20 people using Aircall every day,” Pailhès said. These companies are also driving the product forward, regularly asking for new features and providing valuable feedback.
Now, you can seamlessly forward a call to another team member, use Aircall in Slack and Zendesk. In the future, this product could work with your favorite CRM tool as well — a public API is on its way. If you are part of a phone support team, Aircall could become your central hub for all your phone needs.
Behind the scene, Aircall uses WebRTC so that you can make and receive calls directly from your computer. The company is also working on a mobile app. Like other software-as-a-service startups, Aircall starts at $29 per month and gets more expensive if you need more features and users.
Part of startup studio eFounders, the company just raised a $800,000 seed round from Newfund, and angel investors, such as Oleg Tschelzoff, Michel Meyer, Theo Martin and Davy Kestens.
The company competes with call center SaaS company Talkdesk and existing phone support solutions. It’s hard to know whether this tiny French company will be able to convince medium-sized customers, but Aircall has already managed 300,000 calls so far — an impressive metric for such a young startup.
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