Call analytics platform CallRail today announced a $75 million growth capital financing from Sageview Capital and Leaders Fund to expand beyond its current North American market to other countries, along with accelerating product development and team growth.
“What we see in front of us is a huge opportunity to grow the business,” says Andy Powell, CEO and co-founder of CallRail. “When I look at call analytics, I see that we are 60,000+ companies today, but that’s a very tiny fraction of the companies out there that do marketing and need to have that intelligence. The funding is about three main things: it’s about going after that market; let’s serve all of the customers we possibly can. It’s about doing more for the customers we have — what can we build to help them? And finally, it’s about building new products and services to expand that opportunity for us.”
CallRail helps business owners spend marketing dollars wisely by letting them know which marketing campaigns and search keywords are driving valuable phone calls — leading to better lead close rates. The startup last raised a $1.9M Series A round in January 2015 to scale its team and has been revenue positive in the almost three years since.
This significant new funding will go towards adding 110 jobs by the end of 2018 — more than doubling the current team for a total of around 200 employees.
With interest for the product in other countries growing, Powell is ready to bring CallRail abroad. They will target clients in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and Brazil to start.
“The idea behind the international growth is that historically, for the past 6.5 years, we’ve been focused entirely on the U.S. and Canada,” says Powell. “We recently did the groundwork on the infrastructure level so we could serve customers internationally.”
Founded in 2011, CallRail has rapidly expanded across North America, currently helping more than 65,000
companies and marketing agencies optimize their ad campaigns and effectively track call analytics data to provide more meaningful leads. The company has begun deploying products that use machine learning and AI to identify leads. One of those products, CallScore, automatically classifies a call lead’s quality based on call metadata, content, and other advanced algorithms.
The world has taken notice of their exponential growth — CallRail was recognized as one of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in the nation by Inc. Magazine in 2016 and 2017 and appeared on Deloitte’s Fast 500 ranking of fastest-growing technology companies.
Powell is clear that, despite fast growth, he is also prioritizing the company’s strong work culture to make sure it adapts as they scale. Following the closing of this funding, Powell led a meeting with the entire CallRail team to update them on the company’s current trajectory and what this means for them moving forward.
“One of the things we talked about is what are the benefits and risks of raising investment, particularly raising a substantial investment like we just did,” says Powell. “The real risk that I highlighted was that you grow too fast and you don’t manage to hold on to that culture that made the company special and successful so far.”
“I think that we have to be vigilant when hiring and have to be deliberant when on boarding people to help them get to know the company, the culture, and the things that we value.”
