On Tuesday, San Francisco-based Dialpad announced the closing of its $100 million Series E funding round led by OMERS Growth Equity. This new round brings the company’s total capital raised to $220 million since it was founded in 2011. It also values the company at $1.2 billion, adding Dialpad to a long list of Bay Area unicorns.
Business communications and customer support are still important parts of running a customer-facing business, but the technology has changed a lot since the days of traditional call centers. Now, things like AI-powered chatbots, automated audio transcription and text-based messaging services have made interacting with customers a lot easier. It also has the ability to improve the customer experience — no one likes being put on hold indefinitely.
Dialpad has created a business communications platform that handles a company’s phone system, conferencing and call center needs. The platform is cloud-based, so it can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, which is useful in the age of remote work. The company has also built in various AI features, like real-time transcription and voice analytics.
“We have seen a huge increase in demand for cloud communications tools, and we are raising additional capital to meet this demand,” CEO Craig Walker said in a statement. “Users want a single platform to handle voice, video and messaging. They also want that platform to be smart; to do things like automate note-taking and provide real-time insights and answers in response to what’s happening on a call or meeting. We have invested in real-time speech recognition, natural language processing and voice analytics on a system that works anywhere, on any device.”
Dialpad says that it plans to grow its employee headcount “dramatically” over the next year. Although the company is headquartered in SF, it has offices all over the world and a number of remote workers. Currently, the total employee headcount is over 500.
Dialpad is hiring for several open positions across sales, engineering, HR and marketing in SF. It also has dozens of remote U.S. jobs open.
In addition to hiring, the company hopes to use the funding to build upon its product while expanding domestically and internationally.
