RINGCENTRAL

Vlad Shmunis had already built and sold one company before this. In 1999 he and Vlad Vendrow started RingCentral in Silicon Valley.

The idea was simple. Replace the clunky office phone system that needed a closet full of hardware with software running over the internet.

The problem was timing. In 1999 broadband barely existed and nobody trusted the web with their phone calls.

So they waited. They spent years building while the market caught up.

By 2007 Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures believed enough to lead a $12 million round.

Companies pay RingCentral a monthly fee per employee to run their phones, video meetings, and team messaging over the internet. No phone lines.

No hardware closet. A 500-person company can set up business phone numbers for everyone in an afternoon.

The industry calls this UCaaS, which just means all your work communication delivered as a subscription. The money is recurring and sticky.

Once a company wires its whole workforce into your phone system, ripping it out is a nightmare.

The core product is RingEX, formerly RingCentral MVP, the all-in-one phone, video, and messaging app. RingCX is its newer contact center product for companies running big customer support teams.

It also sells RingSense, an AI layer that transcribes calls and pulls out insights. The pitch across all of them is the same.

One app instead of five.

RingCentral's real growth hack was partnerships. Instead of only selling direct, it powered the phone systems of giants who did not want to build their own.

Avaya, Atos, Alcatel-Lucent, and Vodafone all resold RingCentral under their own brands. That put RingCentral's software inside enterprises it could never have reached alone.

The Avaya deal in 2019 came with a $500 million investment from RingCentral and access to Avaya's huge base of legacy phone customers.

The pandemic was supposed to be RingCentral's moment. Everyone went remote overnight.

But it also handed momentum to Zoom and Microsoft Teams, who bundled calling into tools people already lived in. Why buy a separate phone product when Teams basically throws it in?

RingCentral's stock fell from over $400 in early 2021 to under $30 by 2023. A brutal drop.

The company is still profitable and growing, but the era of easy growth is over. Now it has to prove a standalone phone company can survive against bundled software from Microsoft.

Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures led the early rounds starting in 2007. Cisco, DAG Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank came in later.

By the 2013 IPO, RingCentral had raised about $45 million in private money, which is modest for how big it eventually got. Founder Vlad Shmunis still runs the company as chairman and CEO and remains its largest individual shareholder.