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The Ifbyphone team announced today that it raised another $9 million to propel the voice-based marketing automation company’s growth - a growth that CEO Irv Shapiro estimates will be between 50 and 100 percent each year for the next three years. Currently, Ifbyphone processes about 25 million minutes a month for the 4,000 customers using the product.
Since the number of customers and number of phone calls processed will rise exponentially over the next few years, Shapiro said the company’s employee base will as well: he is starting this off with 25 hires in Chicago at the beginning of this year.
Shapiro said Ifbyphone is “doing some of the most exciting and hardest” projects in the Chicago area right now and that engineers looking to do some true “heavy lifting that is borderline R&D” are welcome to join the team. In addition to engineers, Ifbyphone is aiming to “blow out our sales and marketing teams” with new talent.
“It’s about hiring lots of people and aggressively finding those ‘new economy’ businesses that sell over the telephone,” Shapiro said.
There’s an “irony,” as Shapiro calls it, in new Internet-based companies whose employees work from a variety of locations, still using their voices to sell. These companies, many of which have employees use their own devices at work, need Ifbyphone’s products to manage, automate and analyze these voice conversations.
These trends in the workplace, as well as in selling and mobile advertising, are “causing the need for our service to accelerate rapidly,” Shapiro said. Showing their support of this accelerated growth are long-time backers Origin Ventures, Apex Ventures and I2A as well as new investors River Cities Capital Funds (who led this round) and SSM Partners.
All of these investors, including Chicago-based Apex and Origin, are healthily involved in the company: the board meets formally four times a year, but Shapiro said he is on the phone with at least one board member each day of the week.
This Series D round puts Ifbyphone’s total funding just over $30 million since it was founded in 2005 and poises the company to “very aggressively pursue a leadership role in the business of new voice."
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