Thinking Phone Networks Receives $16.5 Million Investment
October 10, 2012
By
Rory Lidstone, TMCnet Contributing Writer
Thinking Phone (News - Alert) Networks, an enterprise cloud communications service provider focused on bring your own device (BYOD), recently raised a $16.5-million round led by Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV) and Bessemer Venture Partners. The company plans to use the investment to expand its sales, marketing and support service internationally as well as enhance its ThinkingSuite communications delivery ecosystem, while continuing to develop its global partnership network.
Meanwhile, Bob Hower, general partner at ATV, and Bob Goodman, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, have joined the company's board of directors.
“We are entering an exciting phase of growth as we accelerate our investment in global expansion and enhance our suite of mobility-enabled enterprise applications,” said Steven Kokinos, president and CEO, Thinking Phone Networks. “ATV and Bessemer are ideal partners for us, offering significant resources to accelerate our growth, as well as strategic market knowledge, experience, and counsel as we execute our business plan.”
Thinking Phone Networks aims to capitalize on the BYOD trend, as well as the industry-wide move toward cloud unified communications, by offering midsize and large enterprises deeply integrated and analytics-driven single platform collaboration capabilities spanning mobile, voice, video, presence, messaging, conferencing, and contact center. The company has experienced great success thus far, doubling revenue in each of the last three years, and this funding announcement only serves to underscore this success.
Furthermore, Thinking Phone Networks was named among the top cloud VoIP services providers by Gartner in its 2011 report, “Competitive Landscape: Cloud-based VoIP Providers, North America.”
The company's key product, a purpose-built and multitenant cloud software platform, promotes integration of third-party business applications such as CRM and ERP, while addressing the varied needs of service providers, PBX (News - Alert) vendors and channel partners looking to deploy and scale differentiated cloud unified communications services.
In June, Thinking Phone Networks began the expansion of its channel marketing efforts to better enable partners to add cloud services to their portfolios. With this new injection of cash, it appears the company's channel partner program will again receive similar expansion efforts.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey