Numeracle has raised $28 million from Edison Partners to help businesses whose calls are incorrectly labeled as spam or blocked by phone carriers. The Mc Lean, Virginia-based company verifies businesses and links their identities to the phone numbers they use to contact customers. It shares that information with the systems carriers use to screen calls and works to remove incorrect labels.
The financing brings Numeracle's total funding to $34.8 million since its 2018 inception. That total includes a $6.8 million Series A raised in December 2023. Edison was the sole investor in the new round. Numeracle declined to disclose its valuation. The company says it has roughly 4,000 business customers and about 85 employees. It became profitable this year, sooner than expected. Numeracle plans to use its new capital to hire and expand internationally. The company also plans to adapt its business verification tools for use beyond phone calls, eyeing messaging, chat apps, marketplaces and AI agents.
Numeracle faces two related problems: fraudsters increasingly impersonate legitimate businesses, and call-screening systems can prevent their own calls from reaching customers. For example, a patient might ignore a call from a hospital about an upcoming procedure. Numeracle charges an annual subscription to monitor and address incorrect spam labels. Customers can also pay a per-call fee to display their business name, logo and reason for calling on a recipient's phone.
Rebekah Johnson, founder and CEO, recognized the problem while participating in the Federal Communications Commission's Robocall Strike Force in 2016. She warned carriers that screening systems lacked information about who was calling. About three months later, a carrier's federal regulatory counsel called her while she was in her parents' kitchen. "Everything you said was going to happen is happening. What do we do?" she recalled him asking. Johnson said that conversation prompted her to start Numeracle. She was a newly single mother who had lost her job and used her life savings to start the business. Living on a farm in Grand Bay, Alabama, without internet access, she worked from cafes.
Source: Crunchbase News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing