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Spotted: As businesses embrace work from any location, a number of cloud communications businesses are particularly well-placed to benefit from this. One of these is Dialpad, a cloud-based communications platform for businesses, which has recently raised $100 million in a Series E funding round, giving it a $1.2 billion valuation. The company has been able to do this because its focus on unifying businesses’ communications puts it in a strong position as businesses transition to the “new normal” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dialpad was founded by Craig Walker as Dialpad Communications back in 2001. The company was sold to Yahoo four years later, and Walker moved on to found GrandCentral Communications, a web-based service that let users merge their phone and voice mailboxes, and later UberConference, which sought to disrupt the conference call industry. In 2013, Walker bought the Dialpad Communications brand and domain back from Yahoo and renamed itself Dialpad.

The reincarnated Dialpad focuses on AI. They acquired TalkIQ, a platform that transcribes conference calls and used the acquisition as the base for what Dialpad calls Voice Intelligence. This included the ability to automatically generate written notes from a call and to use natural language processing to flag actionable items from meetings and post-call analytics. This includes, for example, identifying issues brought up by customers and the response given by staff. Dialpad has more recently expanded its AI to include intelligent routing and a “visual voicemail” service, which transcribes voicemail into text in real-time. 

The Dialpad app also allows users to turn any computer, smartphone or tablet into a business phone system and integrates with popular collaboration tools such as Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk, Office 365 and Okta. Equally impressive, Dialpad can deploy smaller systems almost immediately. Walker says that “We believe the future of collaboration is not just about connecting people, but about building smart workflows from what has transpired within conversations, and helping people understand the trends or insights within their business conversations.”

It is clear that we will all soon by living – and communicating – in the Cloud. Springwise has closely followed the growth of Cloud-based innovations such as a no-code platform that allows businesses to create their own AI tools and a cloud-based data integration system that aims to prolong EV battery life. Cloud-based communication tools are clearly set to explode. 

Written By: Lisa Magloff

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