Pretty much everyone who has ever dialed into a conference call knows it’s a hassle to keep track of the numbers and to dial in, especially when away from the office. But they’d probably be surprised to learn just how costly conference calls are for their employers, especially if they work for a large multinational company.
MobileDay, a startup based in Boulder, CO, is trying to capitalize on that and announced Wednesday it has raised a $6.6 million Series A round.
MobileDay makes an app that lets users dial in to calls from their smartphones with one touch. All they have to do is sync the app to their calendars, and the app pulls phone numbers and access codes and stores them. The app works with all of the major voice conference providers and online meeting providers like GoToMeeting and WebEx.
But while the app has about 120,000 active users and has won plaudits from publications including Time and Inc., MobileDay CEO Howard Diamond said the startup has greater ambitions than making a handy little app. It wants to turn its MobileDay Advantage software into the go-to product global companies use to manage conference calls and cut costs.
According to Diamond, those costs are pretty steep for companies with thousands of employees who spend several hours on calls over the course of a week, especially if those calls are international. He said conference calls can cost big corporations anywhere from $12 to $70 per employee per month.
Companies are aware of the problem, and back when almost all conference calls were made from the office they used to be pretty savvy about limiting expenses by establishing dialing rules and using their own networks. That’s changed now that employees increasingly use mobile phones to dial in and it’s up to the employee to choose how to dial in, and they don’t always pick the cheapest option, Diamond said.
MobileDay helps cut costs in a number of ways. For corporate customers, the app comes loaded with their dialing rules. In cases where companies use multiple numbers to join a call, MobileDay can determine where a user is and route their call over the cheapest path.
To someone not familiar with the economics of conference calls, picking the right number might not seem like a big deal. But MobileDay clients can save millions per year, Diamond said, with one company expecting to save about $30 million in a year.
Diamond declined to name some of MobileDay’s largest clients or discuss its revenues, but he said the company is about to close deals with two Fortune 50 companies.The four-year-old company, which currently employs 14 people, sees its future as filling the needs of that tier of clients.
If MobileDay can execute on that strategy, Diamond said it’s not easy to put a number on how large its market could be. “There really is no way to size this. There isn’t a company we can’t save money,” Diamond said.
That sounds ambitious for a small startup, but Diamond has experience selling to enterprise customers. Among his prior jobs, Diamond was CEO of Corporate Software, an enterprise software reseller that had annual revenue of $1.2 billion before it was acquired in 2002. MobileDay also is learning it has a base of loyal users who have downloaded the app to their smartphones to simplify their workdays. “They tend to be really evangelical users and recommend us to their employers,” Diamond said.
The Foundry Group led this round, and SoftBank Ventures made a significant investment, Diamond said. SoftTech VC and Bullet Time Ventures reinvested, and Innoventure Partners and Drummond Road Capital joined the round as new investors. Google Ventures also has invested.
With the new cash, MobileDay has raised more than $10.6 million since it was founded in 2010. Diamond said MobileDay will use the money to build up its sales and support staffs to expand its headcount to the low 20s.
