Jan 21, 2020

Spoke Phone co-founders Jason Kerr and Kieron Lawson Mobile voice company SpokePhone announced it has raised $6.7 million in Series A funding, in acapital raising round led by Australian venture capital firm, MarbruckInvestments, with support from New Zealand-based Icehouse Ventures and SirStephen Tindall’s K1W1 fund. Spoke Phone is a mobile-first business phone system thatoffers the same powerful features and integrations available to desktop usersvia their mobile phones. Globally, there are more than 5,640 business phone providersoffering VoIP (Voice over Internet calling) solutions, with Spoke Phone being theonly solution designed specifically for mobile. What is the story behind Spoke Phone? Co-founders Jason Kerr and Kieron Lawson built Spoke Phonebecause they saw a “mobile-first” future where employees prefer using a mobilephone, and where companies have more mobile and remote workers. “With 50% of the workforce expected to be mobile or remoteby 2025, enterprises need to enable workers with fully-integrated mobile-firstbusiness tools,” says Mr Kerr. To prepare for this change, Mr Kerr saysbusinesses of all sizes are undertaking expansive digital transformation andcloud migration projects, with Spoke Phone set to play a large part in thisjourney. As a sign of how far the mobile-first movement has come,Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently revealed it’s been years since he’s used acomputer, ratherhe runs the $143 billion company from his phone . Mr. Kerr continued: “Current phone systems are designed fordesk users, not mobile users. They have significant limitations and withadvances such as 5G and better battery life, a mobile-first future is withinsight.” The investment will be used to further enhance thecapability of Spoke Phone’s existing business phone solution, accelerateexpansion in Australia and the United States, and commercialise Spoke Phone forenterprise, a new solution that helps large customers stuck on legacy phonesystems effortlessly migrate to the cloud. “One of the riskiest and most disruptive cloudtransformations companies face is how to get off their legacy phone system,”says Lachlan Clough, a partner with Marbruck Investments. “We invested in SpokePhone because their technology gives companies a risk-free and non-disruptiveway to gently migrate legacy phone systems to the cloud.” Thousands of companies are stuck on unsupported legacy phonesystems with limited or no mobility, facing significant business disruption,cost, and risk to move to a more modern cloud solution. Spanning from smb to enterprise companies, Spoke’s newproduct works to safely migrate business communications to the cloud in aseries of risk-free steps that can be done while existing supplier contractsrun their course. It means companies no longer need to risk changing everythingin one go. Mr Kerr cites a recent new customer, a large commercialinsurance provider in Australia. “As a large insurance provider, they could notrisk making a wholesale change to their phone system. Retraining employees,rolling out new hardware, and changing the customer experience all at the sametime, is just too much risk. They were able to implement Spoke Phone over topof their legacy phone system while also integrating with Twilio and Amazon aspart of their larger cloud migration journey.”