Wheelings & Dealings: Switch Communications Closes with $35 Million in Series C Funding

By Joe Rizzo
TMCnet Contributing Writer

Switch Communications Inc. is a startup company based in San Francisco that had a public launch at the beginning of this year. The company is focused on unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) and just about four months ago it made its cloud-based communications suite generally available. Since launching, the company released products such as Nosh, NoshList, Jotly, and UberConference, which allows you set up and host conference calls from your smartphone.

A few days ago, Switch announced that it had closed a Series C funding round that brought in $35 million. The funding was led by Amasia Capital, Felicis Ventures, Softbank, and Work-Benche, in addition to Google (News - Alert) Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, who were prior investors, at which time $18 million was raised in funding.

Switch CEO, Craig Walker, said that the company would be using the new funding to grow its market, develop more unified communication (UC) functionality and move beyond the Google App environment. Craig describes the company as the business phone system built for that modern worker. It helps every worker be more productive by bringing all the features of the high-end office phone system to their mobile phones.

In the past, Switch was known as FireSpotter Labs, as the company progressed and matured it developed products that showed a lot of promise. Craig Walker (News - Alert) was CEO of Grand Central, which was acquired by Google in 2007 and is now Google Voice, in addition, he was also the CEO of Dialpad Communications, which was acquired by Yahoo!  (News - Alert)in 2005 and is now known as Yahoo! Voice.

In its latest incarnation, Switch is focusing on the way that enterprises work today and has developed a cloud-based telephony platform with tools designed to give businesses a UC experience across devices. With its two industry-leading products, Switch and UberConference, the company is addressing this demand and transforming how teams communicate, internally, as well as externally, on a global level.

In a recent blog posting, Walker said “When Switch launched in beta last year, we learned a ton from our early adopters and we started talking to investors about doing a Series C round to accelerate our vision for Switch and UberConference. So, with this new round, here’s what we’re setting out to do: For starters, we’re hiring. We have an exciting product roadmap ahead and we need more people to help us execute it quickly.”

Now that the fundraising is behind them, the goal is to forge ahead to keep making the enterprise communication world better. The company’s focus is not just on very large enterprises, there is a great deal of interest from small and medium businesses (SMBs). Most employees at SMBs either work remotely or are constantly mobile, which makes this type of platform something that could definitely be a benefit.