- Edify, a company that is transforming how businesses manage customer engagement, announced it raised $10 million in seed funding
Edify (edify.cx) — a company that is transforming how businesses manage customer engagement and cross-team collaboration — announced recently that it raised $10 million in a seed round of funding. This is considered one of the largest software seed rounds in the U.S. and it is among the 10 largest in the world this year.
The funding round was led by First Round Capital. Anorak Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures, Morado Venture Partners, Bling Capital, Bonfire Ventures, SeaLane Ventures, and Liquid 2 Ventures also joined the round. This round of funding will be used for expanding Edify’s market presence and continue building its sales, marketing, development, and customer success teams.
“The hard truth no one has wanted to confront is that existing contact center technology lags astonishingly far behind the technology we all carry around in our pockets, and we decided that’s just not acceptable anymore,” said Edify co-founder and CEO Cameron Weeks in a statement. “This investment underscores that Edify has developed an industry-altering platform and will enable us to continue to augment our team with the most forward-thinking leaders in machine learning, cloud computing, real-time communication, and customer experience to finally give employees and customers the technology they need and deserve.”
Bill Trenchard, a board member at First Round Capital and Edify partner, has experience in the deep contact center and customer experience industry. For example, Trenchard founded and headed LiveOps — a business process outsourcer (BPO) with more than 20,000 agents — into a $100 million revenue business. As a result, LiveOps became the foundation of a cloud contact center solution provider still operating today. Trenchard founded four other companies, of which one was acquired by Microsoft.
“First Round partners with founders who are exceptionally productive, know how and when to push their teams, and move with grace and speed,” added Trenchard. “Sometimes an entrepreneur like that comes along with an idea to change an industry that has been the same for decades, and we want to get involved. When systems are big and broken at multiple points, they’re ripe with opportunity. With great execution, they can transform the lives of thousands or millions of people and that’s why we’ve chosen Edify.”
Edify’s co-founders Weeks and CTO Bracken Fields had founded the company in their home state of Indiana in October 2018. And it was built on the core belief that businesses should not be trapped by expensive and cumbersome technology. So they invented a unified omnichannel platform to manage internal and external communications.
The Edify team launched Edify Huddle in June 2019 in response to the stagnant contact center (CC) and unified communications (UC) technology landscape. And it unites UC, CC and communications platform (CPaaS/API) functionality in a single cloud-native software solution. Plus Edify Huddle enables users to move seamlessly among channels within one conversation. As a result, this frictionless transfer capability gives agents the ultimate flexibility to interact with customers, one another, and internal subject matter experts for solving problems quickly and completely from a single pane of glass.
