Fuze Pulls in $104M Funding to Drive Growth and Cloud Expansion
As the demand for cloud services continues to increase, the competition in the cloud communications space also stiffens as more and more providers strive to obtain a larger piece of the market. Various providers have addressed the growing demand for cloud solutions by launching innovative products, expanding to other markets, and merging with or acquiring rival companies. And more are following suit like Cambridge-based provider Fuze.
Not one to watch from the sidelines, cloud communications company Fuze announced last week that they, too, will focus on international expansion and product innovation--all of which will be made possible by the whopping $104 million in new funding they recently raised. The new investment round, led by Boston-based investment firm Wellington Management Company, comes about a year after Fuze closed on $112 million from private investors, bringing the company’s total funding to $304 million.
New Funding to Fuel Growth and Expansion
Established in 2006 under the name ThinkingPhones, Fuze offers a cloud-based unified communications (UC) platform designed to improve productivity and collaboration across enterprises. It blends voice, video, messaging, and collaboration tools in a single interface, which increases efficiency in the workplace. In addition to excellent UC features, the Fuze platform features enterprise-grade reliability and security to help keep business communications protected.
In a statement, the company said that 2016 proved to be a great year for them as sales grew by 90 percent, with 36 percent of its business coming from outside of North America. It now counts companies such as The National Geographic Society, Socotec, The Rockport Group, and John Paul among its new customers. Foreseeing even bigger growth, Fuze said the fresh cash influx they recently acquired will be used to fund international expansion and product innovation.
Steve Kokinos, Fuze founder and CEO, had this to say about the latest financing round:
“Over 2016, we experienced tremendous growth in deal size among the large enterprise segment, with CIOs and IT leaders adopting Fuze’s unified communications platform as a central part of their strategy to drive digital transformation in their organizations. This latest round of investment advances Fuze’s aggressive pursuit of the market for our cloud-based business communications platform, accelerates geographic expansion to service our large global customers, and fuels product innovation in ways that align with our long-term growth strategy.”
Gearing Up for Growth in Enterprise Adoption of Unified Communications
A research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. reveals that the size of the Unified Communications market is expected to reach $96 billion by 2023. The demand for UC solutions is expected to be the result of the rising adoption of mobile devices. The report also forecasts that one of the key unified communications market trends will be the steady proliferation of hosted products, with the UC market expected to surpass $49 billion in revenue by 2023.
Fuze’s new funding and its plans for geographic expansion and product innovation clearly indicate that they intend to maintain the company's position as one of the leading UC platforms for global enterprises. “Today’s CIO must lead digital transformation,” Kokinos said. “We believe that championing the modern, connected workforce, with a cloud-based approach to business communications, is central to that strategy. We remain committed to innovating communications solutions with an elegant, all-in-one app people actually want to use because it is built for how they work,” he added.
Here are some of the highlights of the Fuze platform:
- All business communication needs in one platform - Fuze offers a true cloud PBX replacement. Its platform encompasses all business communication features, such as voice, conferencing and collaboration, messaging, and contact center.
- Premium security - Fuze’s geographically-load balanced, multi-data center architecture design makes sure users enjoy 99% uptime and business continuity. Critical business communications and data are also protected, as the platform was designed to support a number of security and data privacy regulations.
- Integration with leading business applications - Fuze offers integrations with leading business applications, including Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft Outlook, and more to help drive user productivity. Users can also enjoy greater flexibility with Fuze APIs, which can be used to customize their UC solution to fit their needs.
- Modern design focused on user experience - Designed with the end user in mind, the platform features a modern, simple interface, which is easy to navigate and accessible even by non-digital natives across different devices.
Even though Fuze was rebranded in February 2016, it has already achieved impressive success and was named by Forbes as one of the 2016’s Next Billion-Dollar Startups and recognized by the Massachusets Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) as the 2016 Emerging Company of the Year. The latter also named the Fuze platform as the “Best Use of Cloud Technology.” In addition, Gartner, Inc. hailed Fuze as a Leader in its 2016 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide report.
Learn more about Fuze and its innovative UC solutions by visiting their website.
About Fuze
Fuze provides Unified Communications solutions for enterprises. Formerly known as ThinkingPhones, Fuze empowers enterprises and today’s modern workforce to achieve greater productivity by integrating voice, video, text, presence, messaging, and collaboration services from a single source through the cloud. The company also offers contact center, analytics, APIs and integrations solutions.