UPDATED 14:19 EDT / FEBRUARY 09 2016

NEWS

As unicorns falter, ThinkingPhones raises $112M to boost cloud-based calling

The sharp decline in venture capital activity that has been recorded over recent quarters didn’t stop ThinkingPhones Inc. from closing a mammoth $112 million round this morning to fund its growth effort. The cloud-based communications provider is rebranding to “Fuze” on the occasion in a bid to reflect the fact that its focus has expanded beyond the mobile VoIP market where co-founders Derek Yoo and Steve Kokinos started their entrepreneurial journey a decade ago.

The name comes from a videoconferencing startup that it purchased back in November as part of an acquisition spree that saw two other competitors bought up since the beginning of 2014. Fuze has extended its value proposition across the full gamut of business collaboration along the way, including most of everything from file sharing to contact center automation. All of its services are integrated in order to give organizations the ability to centrally manage their communications infrastructure.

The feature doubles to support Fuze Analytics, a homegrown business intelligence tool that makes it possible to correlate activity records from across the firm’s portfolio to identify areas for improvement. For instance, a manager could check how much time workers in a globally-distributed unit spend interacting with one another and make more room for meetings on the team schedule if collaboration is found to be lacking. The same functionality can be used to improve the performance of customer representatives and thereby boost revenue.

Fuze’s sales pitch has won over hundreds of organizations including Groupon Inc., General Motors Co., Zenefits Inc. and numerous other big names. Its investor roster is equally impressive, especially with the addition of new backer Summit Partners as part of today’s funding round. The company reportedly plans to use the capital in order to double its headcount by the end of the year, largely through the hiring of new sales personnel throughout Europe and Asia.

Image via bykst

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