PRESS RELEASE: Fuze announced it has closed $104 million in financing led by Wellington Management Company LLP. This investment brings the company’s total funding to $304 million. The new capital will be used to continue expanding internationally and to fund product innovation for Fuze’s enterprise customer segment. Wellington Management Company LLP is joined by Greenspring Associates and existing investors Summit Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), and G20.
A global UCaaS platform, Fuze empowers productivity and collaboration across enterprises with modern cloud-based voice, video, and messaging solutions. By seamlessly integrating voice, video, and messaging into a simple, elegant experience, Fuze is designed to power every conversation at work with the enterprise-grade reliability and security that businesses require.
In 2016, Fuze grew sales by 90 percent, adding 449 new customers, including The National Geographic Society, The Rockport Group, Socotec, and John Paul with 36 percent of business coming from outside of North America. Its top ten deals of 2016 represented a combined $71 million in contract value, solidifying Fuze’s position as the leading UCaaS platform for global enterprises.
“Over 2016, we experienced tremendous growth in deal size among the large enterprise segment, with CIOs and IT leaders adopting Fuze’s unified communications platform as a central part of their strategy to drive digital transformation in their organizations,” said Steve Kokinos, Fuze Founder and CEO. “This latest round of investment advances Fuze’s aggressive pursuit of the market for our cloud-based business communications platform, accelerates geographic expansion to service our large global customers, and fuels product innovation in ways that align with our long-term growth strategy.”
Global Market Insights, Inc., forecasts the unified communications market to reach $96 billion by 2023 and predicts a steady proliferation of hosted products will be one of the key unified communications market trends, eliminating infrastructure cost and offering a centralized management system wherein services are provided by means of the cloud.
Fuze marked 2016 with record growth, international expansion, and market recognition for its industry leading cloud-based communications platform. Forbes named the company one of 2016’s Next Billion-Dollar Startups, and the publication also ranked Fuze 19th on its first-ever Forbes 2016 Cloud 100, the definitive list of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world. The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) recognized Fuze as the 2016 “Emerging Company of the Year” and named its platform the “Best Use of Cloud Technology.” Fuze was also positioned by Gartner, Inc. as a Leader in its 2016 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide report*.
After rebranding to Fuze in early 2016, the company later unveiled a completely redesigned UX: a best-of-breed, enterprise-grade platform supported by the high degree of quality, reliability, security, and analytics demanded by today’s businesses. To meet global demand, Fuze expanded operations in Asia Pacific with the opening of a new Sydney office and three new data centers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney. It also grew across Europe, opening new offices in Munich, Zurich, and Madrid, following on the heels of the company’s existing operations in the U.K., the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal, and France.
“Today’s CIO must lead digital transformation,” continued Kokinos. “We believe that championing the modern, connected workforce, with a cloud-based approach to business communications, is central to that strategy. We remain committed to innovating communications solutions with an elegant, all-in-one app people actually want to use because it is built for how they work.”
*Research Report Source: Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide, Daniel O’Connell, Bern Elliot, Aug. 23, 2016. Fuze formerly known as Thinking Phones.