The founders of Google Voice just raised $50 million to scale a business-call platform they think could put an end to phonelines once and for all

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The founders of Google Voice just raised $50 million to scale a business-call platform they think could put an end to phonelines once and for all

Craig Walker Dialpad

Dialpad

Dialpad CEO Craig Walker formed the company in 2011 after selling another digital phone company to Google.

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  • After selling consumer-oriented digital phone call companies to Yahoo and Google, Craig Walker decided to disrupt the landline-filled world of business communication.
  • The result was Dialpad, a digital business communication platform built by a cohort of Google Voice alumni, which just raised $50 million to grow its platform.
  • The startup, which was last valued at $250 million in a 2017 funding round, will use its new funding to expand its artificial intelligence offerings and grow its team by at least 100 people.

Dialpad CEO Craig Walker wants to replace desk phones once and for all.

"We're the only competitor built after the iPhone launched," Walker told Business Insider. "It was built for a different world; It was built for a world of mobility and world where the modern worker isn't sitting at a desk or picking up a desk phone."

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dialpad

Dialpad

Dialpad wants to replace landlines with desktop and mobile app calls.

Dialpad is a digital business communication platform designed to handle two-way phone calls, conference calls, and call-center work via a desktop browser or mobile app.

On Tuesday, Dialpad announced its $50 million series D funding round, led by ICONIQ Capital with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz. Dialpad didn't disclose its new valuation, but the company was last valued at $250 million in 2017, according to PitchBook.

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That funding will be used to build out new artificial intelligence tools, and to grow its existing 275 person team by at least 100 more, with new offices arriving across Asia and Europe.

Though Dialpad functions as a work phone, the platform has access to vast troves of data - a necessary component of effective AI. Its platform integrates with other workplace productivity tools like Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce and G Suite, and soon its AI tools will give users live transcriptions, sentiment analysis and coaching that tells employees what to do next on a call.

Those new features, which are expected to roll out over the next couple of months, are the direct result of Dialpad's reported $50 million acquisition of a competing startup called TalkIQ, which the companies announced in May.

"It's a really unique offering to a really large market that's been dominated by antiquated legacy vendors like Cisco and Avaya," Walker said.

Dialpad formed straight out of Google Voice

Dialpad, in its current incarnation, was founded in 2011 by a cohort of Google Voice people who wanted to refocus their expertise on a paid product aimed at enterprises, instead of the free consumer phone tool offered by Google.

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Around half of Dialpad's first 30 hires came from Google, according to Walker, which has been good news for the business since product people at Google know a thing or two about building to scale.

young larry page sergey brin

RANDI LYNN BEACH / AP Images

Google co-founders Larry page (left) and Sergey Brin saw the potential for digital calls early on.

"If you launch a product at Google, particularly a consumer product, it has to theoretically scale to be able support 100 million users on Day One. And that made us build the Google Voice platform in a way that scaled like no other phone system before it or since could," Walker said.

"So when we left to build this, we built it in the same way. That allows us to take on a company like Uber that could add 1,000 people during a lunch break and we wouldn't even notice," he said. (As of 2017, Uber had 16,000 employees around the world.)

But the team's journey started long before Google Voice.

Walker and chief product officer Vincent Paquet co-founded the first version of Dialpad, under the same name, back in 2001, before being acquired by Yahoo in 2005. The pair stayed at the corporation for about 6 months before leaving to start another telecommunication startup called GrandCentral.

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It was GrandCentral that was ultimately acquired by Google for a reported $50 million in 2007. It became Google Voice, the company's consumer-oriented phone service, which gives users a free phone number that they can use to make and receive calls from within a web browser.

Though the team stayed on for a few years, the magic faded once "Google got very concerned with Facebook," Walker said. Everyone's attention shifted toward launching the company's ultimately underwhelming social media network Goolge+, "and that's when we decided to leave and go work on solving this for enterprises," he continued.

Once things fizzled with Google, Walker had one more challenge: buying the original name back from Yahoo, which he got, thus preventing him from facing an even bigger stressor.

"One of the hardest parts of starting a company as an entrepreneur," Walk said, "is getting a URL that makes sense and is memorable, and ends in dot-com."

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