IOVOX Takes Investment From VC Octopus To Scale Up In Europe

IOVOX, a provider of telephony analytics which we’ve covered before, has secured investment from London-based Octopus Investment. Specifically from the Octopus Titan 4 Venture Capital Trust (VCT) and Octopus Titan 5 VCT. The cash will be used for expansion. Although terms were unreleased, we understand the investment allows the founders to retain control of the direction of the company, which, given this is an institutional round, indicates this is not a low round, but not at a knock-it-out-of-the-park level either.

IOVOX is a startup specialising in something known as VaaS (Voice as a Service). Their telephony platform allows companies to build services on the telephone network that do real-world, heavy-lifting style jobs which normally require call centres. Companies which have taken on the service include News International and many others.

It competes with the likes of AdInsight, Tropo and Twilio among others, but has gained a reputation in Europe as a bespoke enterprise player. The IOVOX platform gives real-time visibility into all aspects of telephone traffic, enabling customers to track, analyse and optimise lead generation from telephone campaigns.

The ventures team at Octopus has started to attract attention for its growth funding strategy, specifically backing startups that tend to grow more organically into businesses such as Zoopla, Graze.com, SwiftKey and Secret Escapes.

Ryan Gallagher, CEO and founder of IOVOX, says he took the investment to scale up the business based on demand from from customers like BT. “Despite the prevalence of sophisticated online analytical tools, when a business receives an inbound phone call it is difficult for it to understand what has led to that person making the call. IOVOX addresses this problem. We enable companies to measure the effectiveness of offline marketing campaigns in a very novel way and we are really excited about working with Octopus to expand our services into new geographies.”