Software company dedicated to changing the way that companies manage cross-team collaboration and customer engagement solutions, Edify, recently announced that it had closed a $10 million round of seed funding. Currently, this is one of the four largest software seed funding rounds to appear in the United States, and one of the ten largest in the world for 2019.
The latest round of funding was led by First-Round Capital, a San-Francisco-based venture capital firm with partners that have worked alongside brands like Uber, Warby Parker, and Roblox. Some of the other investors in this round included Pathbreaker Ventures, Anorak Ventures, Morado Venture Partners, Bonfire Ventures, Bling Capital, Liquid 2Ventures, and SeaLane Ventures. According to Edify, the funding will be used to expand the company’s market presence and continue building development, marketing, customer success, and sales teams.
Creating Next-Gen Contact Centres
According to the CEO and co-founder of Edify, Cameron Weeks, no-one in the market before Edify wanted to address the issues with seriously outdated contact centre technology. Edify’s team decided that the old-fashioned technology simply wasn’t acceptable anymore. The latest round of investment highlights the fact that Edify has developed a pioneering platform, and the company plans on augmenting its team going forward with leaders in machine-learning, cloud-computing, customer experience, and real-time communication. They hope to continue giving customers and employees the contact centre technology that they want and need.
Edify’s board member and partner at First-Round Capital, Bill Trenchard, has deep-seated experience in customer experience and contact centre, having led and founded the LiveOps brand. LiveOps achieved $100 million in revenue and became the foundation of a cloud contact centre solution that still operates now. Trenchard has also founded four other companies in his career, including one that was acquired by Microsoft.
According to Trenchard, First-Round partners is committed to investing in founders that are exceptionally productive, innovative, and know-how to move with speed and grace. Sometimes, entrepreneurs appear with ideas that have the potential to change an industry, and that’s when First-Round partners want to get involved.
Looking Forward to Future Growth
Trenchard noted that when systems are large and broken at various points, they offer a wide range of opportunities. The right strategy allows innovative companies to transform the lives of millions of people at once. First-Round Partners believe that Edify can have this kind of impact.
Co-founder for Edify, Bracken Fields, and Weeks launched the company from their home state of Indiana in October 2018. Building on the belief that companies shouldn’t be trapped by stale, cumbersome, and expensive technology, the founders committed themselves to creating an omni-channel and unified platform for the management of external and internal communication. Edify Huddle was launched in 2019 as a response to the new needs of the contact centre and UC technology landscape. By uniting UC, CC, and CPaaS functionality, Edify Huddle allows users to move seamlessly among a range of channels within a single conversation.
