ThinkingPhones, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, cloud service that offers messaging, phone service and video streaming, announced $112 million investment round today.
The company also announced it was changing its name to Fuze, which happens to be the name of the cloud video company it purchased last fall.
The round was led by Summit Partners with help from current investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total to almost $200 million, according to Crunchbase.
They did not want to discuss a valuation. “Our view is the unicorn situation is overdone,” CEO Steve Kokinos told TechCrunch.
The company actually went on a little buying binge between 2014 and 2015. In addition to Fuse, Crunchbase reports the company bought Contactive in February 2014, giving the company pop-up contact information about the caller. It then acquired Whaleback Managed Services in August that year.
Fuze has been adding these pieces with a purpose of building a full communications stack in the cloud, that not only provides these major services around messaging, phone and video; but also pulls them together and provides contextual data to link the call to real business requirements, Kokinos said.
He sees that data integration as a key differentiator. For instance, it allows a customer service rep to see the call is from a customer with red flag problem from Zendesk or a sales person to see this is a blue chip customer from Salesforce. This kind of integration adds value throughout the service offerings, while using machine learning and analytics to help push the right information at the right time, Kokinos explained.
He says another differentiator is they are a pure cloud business offering all these service to enterprises with at least 1000 employees.
The company started slowly launching in 2006, but by 2012 it had begun to take off. Today it has 1500 customers. The company has doubled revenue each year since 2013, Kokinos said.
Today’s funding comes on the heels of three previous healthy rounds including a $16.5 million round in 2012, another $10 million in 2013 and $56.7 million at the end of 2014.
The company took that massive influx of funds and grew from 200 employees at the beginning of 2015 to 700 by the end of the year. With the latest round it’s ready to grow even more, hoping to double the number of employees by the end of this year, at least partly through increasing its international presence. That means building up the sales and marketing teams in Europe and Asia and building a new data center in Latin America in 2016. And of course it will continue to invest in research and product development.
As for an IPO, he’s says while it’s something he thinks about, nothing is imminent. “We are not in a hurry. We’ll assess it over the next couple of years. We have plenty of cash,” he said.
With a fresh $112 million in pocket, he’s not kidding.