- SignalWire — the Original Geeks of software-defined telecommunications and developers of FreeSWITCH — announced it closed $11.5 million
SignalWire — the Original Geeks of software-defined telecommunications and developers of the number one open-source enterprise communication platform FreeSWITCH — announced it closed $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Storm Ventures. Samsung NEXT and Sequoia Capital (Sequoia Scouts) also participated in the round along with Eric S. Yuan (Zoom CEO), Dean Drako (Barracuda Networks founder), Jerry Yang (AME Cloud Ventures and Yahoo co-founder), and Ron Neuenberger (AngelFire).
This round of funding will be used for accelerating the development of SignalWire’s Cloud communication platform, a new offering that allows developers to embed voice, messaging, and video capabilities into applications using advanced real-time APIs.
“We’ve built the technology core for the world’s most technically demanding and globally scaled communications products and services. SignalWire is the next phase in our goal to democratize communications by making this infinitely powerful technology accessible to anyone with an idea. Developers should be limited only by their imaginations, not by their budget for minutes and messages or development cycles required to solve problems we’ve spent the past 15 years solving.”
At the annual telecom developers conference ClueCon in Chicago, SignalWire CEO Anthony Minessale II reiterated the company’s mission:
“For more than a decade, there has been a need for a strong cloud-based developer platform which could significantly impact the telephony communications market,” added Drako. “SignalWire has the right architecture to deliver.”
SignalWire’s open-source project started at ClueCon in 2006 and rapidly grew from a single voice-over IP call to millions of lines of code. And it lays claim to the largest install base and most powerful feature set of any enterprise-grade communications platform. SignalWire Cloud allows developers of all skill sets to access the underlying power of FreeSWITCH technology via an elastic cloud platform.
“We are the original; many of these co-called platforms are utilizing a technology stack that we developed to connect to basic carrier services, then they price-gouge for these services. There is no real value-add there,” SignalWire COO Sean Heiney explained. “We are philosophically opposed to this model. We have spent the past 15 years on a mission to remove such barriers to innovation and we’ll add real value with auto-scaling elastic cloud infrastructure and advanced APIs that allow for true real-time voice, video, and messaging application control.”
SignalWire’s usage-based pricing model also features minimal markup on the carrier services accessed using their APIs such as per-minute and per-SMS charges — a move that could cause major disruption in a space occupied by API providers whose bottom lines depend on comfortable margins on these same services.
“We’ve made it extremely easy to migrate existing applications so that customers can immediately take advantage of our disruptive pricing and experience what a true cloud communications platform has to offer. We’re here to help you build your next-generation communications applications and infrastructure,” commented SignalWire CTO Evan McGee.
In an effort to provide relief to customers using competing services, SignalWire has created its own syntax that is backward compatible with the leading competitor’s language aptly titled LāML.
“SignalWire is unique in that it offers superior functionality by leveraging the power of open source and the knowledge-base community that has operated for more than a decade,” commented Patrick Chang, a principal at Samsung NEXT. “We see great potential in SignalWire’s ability to blend traditional telecom, mobile, and application-based communication devices to help enable the future of cloud-based person-to-person and machine-to-machine communication.”
The key features of the SignalWire Cloud platform include globally scalable elastic cloud infrastructure and disruptive pricing with guaranteed industry-low rates for carrier services including SMS, voice, 10-digit and shortcode phone numbers. And it also includes a compatibility layer for applications developed on using other providers and advanced APIs featuring true real-time bi-directional data transmission allowing for complete command and control of applications. And it also offers unrivaled support including real-time chat with experts in communications technology along with continuing development of open-source resources including Libraries and SDKs in most popular programming languages.
“The company is founded by domain experts who see the intersection of cloud computing and telecommunications infrastructure, which has huge market potential. In addition, the core technology is trusted by their existing global ecosystem of developers,” noted Luis Robles (former partner at Sequoia Capital and co-founder of XStarPartners). “Their technology has already achieved widespread adoption and unlike traditional early-stage companies, SignalWire is positioned to rapidly leapfrog the competition.”
