FOCUS UNICORN | Aircall, the centaur of cloud telephony

Founded in 2014 within the start-up studio eFounders by Olivier Pailhes, Jonathan Anguelov, Pierre-Baptiste Béchu and Xavier Durand, Aircall offers a cloud telephony solution for businesses. By raising $8 million in 2016, the start-up managed to export to the American market by setting up in New York.

From 2021, Aircall establishes its presence in Europe and Asia Pacific and becomes the 16th French unicorn thanks to a funding round of 120 million dollars. After initially targeting SMEs and ETIs, the scale-up now counts among its most emblematic clients: Blablacar, Caudalie, ManoMano, Olympique Lyonnais, Too Good To Go and Ankorstore. It also maintains privileged relationships with historical partners such as Hubspot and Salesforce as well as with Intercom, Zendesk and Pipedrive.

Lately, the nugget also claims to be “centaur”: a new legendary category invented by the American venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners to more rationally measure the potential of a rising start-up. Concretely, instead of being based on the valuation at more than a billion dollars as provided by the name “unicorn”, the “centaur” designates a company which posts more than 100 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

The latest growth figures:

Aircall achieves $100 million in recurring annual revenue and thus becomes a “centaur”.

Last lift to date:

The start-up completed a $120 million funding round in June 2021 with Goldman Sachs Asset Management, bringing Aircall’s valuation to over $1 billion.

Workforce:

The scale-up has 700 employees in Paris, New York, Madrid and Sydney.

New objectives for 2022:

• R&D: improving the product with new artificial intelligence features and adding additional productivity features for call centers, such as transcription and speech analysis.
• Internationalization: continued international development by getting closer to the specific needs in each country – while continuing to focus on key regions such as North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. New offices in Madrid and Singapore were also opened.
• Partnerships & integrations: reinforcement of the Aircall application marketplace with its integration partners, in order to cover all use cases, from e-commerce to financial services, Sales, Support teams, and channel partners. The company also wants to partner more with large telecommunications companies, like the partnership with Deutsche Telekom in Germany.

IPO ?

“An IPO is also one of the medium-term objectives. “Summarizes Jonathan Anguelov, co-founder & EMEA-APAC CEO of Aircall.

Quote from Jonathan Angelov:

“We are very proud of the progress made in eight years. This is a strong sign of the growing global demand from companies for cloud solutions. Reaching $100 million in revenue is a significant milestone, which provides valuable insight into Aircall’s performance capabilities in a volatile market, and it also brings us closer to an IPO. Having opened offices in Australia, the UK and Germany, we are excited to continue our expansion around the world, and continue to build a team that continually pushes the boundaries of what a cloud solution like ours is. can offer”.