Numeracle, a McLean, Virginia, company that helps businesses keep their calls from being blocked or labeled as spam, has raised a $28 million growth investment from Edison Partners. Numeracle announced the round on October 28, the same morning Crunchbase News reported it as an exclusive and said Edison was the only investor.
The Numeracle funding is about four times the size of the $6.8 million Series A the company raised in December 2023. The company told Crunchbase News that its total funding is now $34.8 million, and the outlet reported that Numeracle became profitable this year.
What Numeracle does
Carriers screen calls with systems that block or label suspected spam, and those systems also catch legitimate callers such as hospitals, schools and airlines, the release said. Numeracle first verifies that a business exists and operates as it claims, then uses that verified identity to head off wrong labels and to press carriers to remove them. Verified businesses can also have their name shown on outbound calls.
Customers pay an annual subscription for the label monitoring and can pay a per-call fee to show their name, logo and reason for calling, Crunchbase News reported. They range from local businesses to Fortune 500 companies in financial services, retail, healthcare and home services, according to the release.
Rebekah Johnson, Numeracle's founder and CEO, worked in regulatory compliance at the telecom provider West and served on the Federal Communications Commission's Robocall Strike Force, where, according to the release, she cautioned carriers that heavy-handed blocking and labeling would hurt honest callers as well as fraudsters. She said in the release that the company treats the problem as one of identity:
We built Entity Identity Management because fraud and impersonation are not fundamentally communications problems, they are identity problems.Rebekah Johnson, founder and CEO of Numeracle
What the money is for
Numeracle will hire in sales and marketing, product, and research and development, and expand outside the United States, the company said. Numeracle also plans to carry its verification from voice calls to messaging and other digital channels, and sells the checks on their own as Know Your Customer as a Service (KYCaaS), so platforms can confirm a business is real before taking it on.
Lenard Marcus, a general partner at Edison Partners, said Numeracle had become a trusted partner both to the businesses making calls and to the carriers delivering them.
The numbers
The 2023 round appears in Numeracle's Form D filing: $6.8 million sold to six investors, with the first sale on December 13, 2023. An amendment filed the same day raised the amount from the $6 million in the original notice. No Form D for the new round had appeared on EDGAR by October 29.
Numeracle said its recurring revenue grew 70%, but the two published versions of its release give different periods. Numeracle's own copy says annual recurring revenue rose 70% year over year; the copy on Edison Partners' site says the annualized revenue run rate rose 70% in the past 16 months.
