RingCentral (News - Alert) has announced that it has closed a $12 million series B financing led by DAG Ventures and joined by returning investors Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. The company will use the new funding to build new partnerships and distribution channels, enhance its products and services and increase awareness among its large and growing target market of small businesses.
Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral founder and CEO said in a company press release, “Our strong customer growth coupled with this investment from top VCs underscores that we're reaching a large and underserved market. Before, small businesses were left in the gap between costly enterprise services and insufficient consumer solutions. We're offering a new way for them to get the most out of a critical business tool, their communications.”
RingCentral offers integrated voice/web applications and the advanced capabilities of traditional office public branch exchange (PBX
) systems. Compared to the traditional PBX (News - Alert) or office phone systems, RingCentral is hosted on the web and is delivered in a subscription-based, software-as-a-service model. It offers many services such as greetings recorded by professional voice talent, optional voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP
) lines, multiple extensions with voicemail, message alerts on cell phones or PDAs, toll-free and local business phone and fax numbers, setup and customization in minutes on the web and call-forwarding to any phone.
Thanks to such features, RingCentral's small business customers can now use the voice communications in new ways and get ease of use, better functionality over traditional office phone systems and the reduction in expenses.
In the current market scenario, very few businesses would set up their own web or email software using onsite hardware. As an increasing number of software is outsourced as a service, RingCentral extends this value proposition to telecom hardware, saving thousands in cost and providing more functionality.
On this occasion, the company has also announced that it surpassed 50,000 active customer accounts.
Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Don't forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Private Branch Exchange (PBX) | X |
| Originally, telephone features were provided by telephone central office switching systems, often called CENTREX.�PBX systems emerged as customers wanted to have more calling features and control over...more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
| IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Voice over IP (VoIP) | X |
| A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
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