Call center software startup Aircall SE hit unicorn status today after raising $120 million in a late-stage funding round, just 13 months after it raised just over half that amount.

The Series D round was led by the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and joined by existing investors DTCP, eFounders, Draper Esprit, Adams Street Partners, NextWorld Capital, Swisscom Ventures and Gaia Capital Partners.

Based in France, Aircall was founded in 2014. It sells a cloud-based call center software platform that can be used by customer support and sales teams to field thousands of calls per day.

It’s a software-as-a-service product that’s meant to replace legacy call center systems and scale as its customers grow their operations. With Aircall, customers get access to virtual phone numbers in each country they do business in. The system takes care of configuring greeting messages, setting up business hours and handling call queues.

Where Aircall’s platform excels the way it handles more complex calls. The platform makes it possible to send a caller to multiple agents at once if necessary, or a specific person, followed by a second person if that first individual isn’t available. The platform also provides a general overview of all the calls taking place so they can be assigned, tagged and organized.

Another useful capability of Aircall is that it can integrate with popular business tools such as Salesforce, Zendesk and Zoho. It can also integrate with Intercom, allowing agents to switch from a call to a text conversation in a single click.

With remote interactions becoming more common during the COVID-19 pandemic, Aircall was well-placed to benefit, and that is exactly how it went down. The company claims that it saw record-breaking growth across all of its businesses over the past year.

That includes total customer growth of 65%, with more than 8,500 customers worldwide now using its platform. And than a third of Aircall’s revenue now comes from the U.S., despite the startup’s European roots.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen a rise in both remote workforce adoption and customers’ expectations from the brands they do business with,” Aircall Chief Executive Olivier Pailhes (pictured) wrote in a blog post today. “Aircall’s cloud-based phone solution helps businesses meet these new objectives with better data visibility into team performance and call data, while also providing a flexible, user-friendly solution.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that of all the industries that have undergone change due to COVID-19, few have felt the impact as much as call centers have. “Call center software providers are plentiful and it’s good to see a European player in the mix with France’s Aircall getting fresh capital through its Series D. Now, we’ll wait to see how it invests that cash, but the key is to get the balance right between R&D and go-to-market,” he added.”

‘Aircall is part of a growing wave of cloud-based contact center software companies that are reimagining how companies communicate with their customers and making it far easier to blur the lines between customer service and sales,” added Mueller’s colleague at Constellation Research, Nicole France. “Tools that facilitate switching between channels and across agents within the same conversation mean traditional job roles can be redefined. Without strict boundaries between sales and service, for example, employees can better engage with customers and ultimately built better—and more valuable—relationships.”

Aircall said it has already worked out how to spend most of the money, with one of its main goals being to enrich its app ecosystem and create more integrations to cover new use cases such as e-commerce and financial services. The company also plans to create new features for the Aircall software. In particular, it aims to create new artificial intelligence-based capabilities and add productivity features such as transcription and speech analytics.

“For businesses to better connect with their customers, they need to extract more value from conversations through call analytics, conversational context, and speech recognition,” Pailhes said. “These are all coming up next in our product roadmap, to deliver rich and insightful moments between our customers and theirs.”

Also on the to-do list is more global expansion, with Aircall planning to add new offices in London and Berlin and make more investments in its customer-facing teams in North America and Asia-Pacific. In addition, the company is looking to partner with major telecommunications firms and bring its platform to more companies and professionals by leveraging local networks’ expertise, Pailhes said.

“The past 12 months have been a catalyst for Aircall’s cloud-based SaaS communication solution,” said Goldman Sachs Managing Director Christian Resch. “In a hybrid work environment, users are looking to Aircall to provide an easy to use experience that is highly integrated into their workflows, thereby making the most out of every customer interaction.”

Photo: Aircall