AIRCALL

Aircall was born inside eFounders, a Paris startup studio that builds companies from scratch. In 2014 a group of co-founders launched it, with Olivier Pailhes and Jonathan Anguelov taking the lead as CEO and COO.

They spotted a boring but huge problem. Small businesses still ran phone support on ancient hardware and expensive telecom contracts.

Aircall's answer was a phone system that lived entirely in a web browser. Sign up, pick a number, and your support team is live in minutes.

Balderton Capital made its first investment in the 2016 seed round and stuck around for years.

Aircall sells cloud-based phone and call-center software to small and mid-sized businesses. Companies pay a monthly fee per user for phone numbers, call routing, and analytics, all run through a browser or app.

The killer feature is integration. Aircall connects to the tools sales and support teams already use, like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk.

Every call gets logged against the right customer automatically. So a support agent sees the full history the moment the phone rings.

That is the whole sell. Phones that actually talk to your other software.

The core product is the Aircall cloud phone and call-center platform, run from a browser or desktop app. Around it sits the App Marketplace, with more than 100 one-click integrations into CRMs and helpdesks.

Newer AI features transcribe calls, summarize them, and score conversations so managers can coach agents. The point of all of it is the same.

Make a phone system that small teams can run without an IT department.

Aircall grew by going where the customers already were. It built an app marketplace with more than 100 integrations, so instead of competing with Salesforce or HubSpot it became the phone add-on inside them.

Sales teams shopping for a CRM would find Aircall waiting in the app store. It also leaned hard on its dual Paris and New York base to sell across Europe and the US at the same time.

By 2021 it served more than 15,000 businesses on both continents.

Aircall lives in a crowded, low-margin corner of software. Dozens of companies sell cloud phones to small businesses, and switching costs are lower than in the enterprise world.

Its customers, mostly small teams, churn faster and pay less than the big corporate accounts that RingCentral chases. Aircall also raised its last big round in 2021 and has stayed private since, through a funding winter that has been hard on unprofitable software companies.

The path to a profitable, standalone future is real but narrow.

Aircall has raised about $226 million. Balderton Capital backed it from the 2016 seed round onward.

NextWorld Capital, Draper Esprit, DTCP, and Swisscom Ventures joined along the way. The headline round was a $120 million Series D in June 2021, led by the growth arm of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, which pushed Aircall past a $1 billion valuation and into unicorn territory.