GENESYS

Gregory Shenkman and Alec Miloslavsky founded Genesys in 1990 in Menlo Park, California. They started with $150,000 in loans from their own families.

The idea was computer-telephony integration. Basically, making phone systems talk to computer databases.

So when you call a company, the agent can see your account on screen before they even say hello. That was cutting-edge in the early 1990s.

Genesys went public on the Nasdaq in 1997 under the ticker GCTI. It became the backbone software running huge enterprise call centers around the world.

Genesys sells software that runs large customer service operations. Big banks, airlines, and insurers use it to handle millions of calls, chats, and emails.

It used to sell software licenses that companies installed on their own servers. Now it mostly sells a cloud subscription called Genesys Cloud, billed per agent per month.

The customers are huge. A single airline might run tens of thousands of support agents on Genesys.

That makes each contract worth a lot of money and very hard to rip out once it is installed.

Genesys Cloud CX is the flagship cloud platform for running contact centers, billed per agent. Genesys Multicloud is a version for large enterprises with complex needs.

Genesys Engage is the older enterprise platform still used by the biggest customers. There are AI and automation tools that predict why a customer is calling and route them accordingly.

Workforce engagement tools cover scheduling and coaching support agents.

Genesys grew the old-fashioned way first. It sold enterprise software and bought competitors for decades.

The real turn came when it bet everything on the cloud. In 2016 it bought Interactive Intelligence for about $1.4 billion, and that product became the base of its modern cloud platform.

By 2021 more than 90% of its new bookings were cloud subscriptions, and those bookings were doubling year over year. That cloud shift is what took the valuation from $3.8 billion in 2016 to $21 billion in 2021.

Genesys carries the baggage of being old. A chunk of its revenue still comes from legacy on-premise software that customers are slowly moving off.

Getting those customers onto the cloud without losing them to rivals is a constant fight. The competition is fierce and younger.

Five9, Talkdesk, NICE, and Amazon Connect all chase the same enterprise deals. Genesys is also owned by investors who eventually want an exit.

An IPO has been rumored for years. Turning a 35-year-old company into a growth stock the public market wants to buy is not easy.

Genesys has changed hands several times. Alcatel bought it for $1.5 billion in 2000.

Private equity firms Permira and Technology Crossover Ventures bought it back for $1.5 billion in 2012. Hellman & Friedman took a $900 million stake in 2016 that valued the company at $3.8 billion.

The big one came in December 2021. Genesys raised $580 million at a $21 billion valuation, led by Salesforce Ventures, with ServiceNow Ventures, Zoom, BlackRock, and D1 Capital joining in.