Hiya, a Whitepages spinout, nabs $18M to for its smart caller ID technology
Hiya came to life a year ago when it was spun out by Whitepages to take on TrueCaller and others in the world of smart caller ID services. Using machine learning and a vast database of calling data (3.5 billion calls to date), Hiya’s mission has been to supercharge the humble phone call — by providing detailed information about who is calling you, whether it’s a regular person or an IRS fraudster.
Now a fully independent company, Hiya is today announcing its first outside funding to grow its business: a Series A of $18 million led by Balderton with participation also from Nautilus Venture Partners and Lumia Capital.
Phone calls are the oldest and possibly most negelcted part of mobile phones these days, and Alex Algard — who founded and led Whitepages but left that business to lead and build Hiya — told TechCrunch in an interview that the funding will be used to change that perception by adding in more services to make calls more useful and actionable.
“We recognise that there has been remarkable little innovation on what is the core app of the smartphone, the phone app itself,” he said. “We think this is a massive opportunity, and we’re partnering with smartphone OEMs and wireless carriers to provide innovation as deeply as possible.”
The cash infusion comes after a year of pretty impressive growth for the startup: Hiya already has 20 million users in 196 countries, by virtue of the fact that it deep partnerships with carriers like T-Mobile and AT&T, and Samsung and ZTE, two of the world’s biggest phone makers. Companies like these integrate Hiya’s technology directly into their phones and diallers; and for those not on those networks or using phones made by those OEMs — namely the iPhone, where Apple keeps the calling experience close — Hiya also has an app.
Hiya’s growth comes at an interesting juncture in the mobile world. When it comes to communicating on smartphones these days, a lot of the focus is on messaging apps, where you can better control who you chat with, whether it’s via a text-based message or an audio or video call. But there’s also a trend in the mobile world where we are seeing some smart tech solutions emerging to bring some of the more legacy functions of phones into the modern era.
One of the reasons why those messaging apps have proven to be so popular is that they have let people control their experiences in a better way: for example, with Messenger, you connect with people who are your contacts already (and send them stickers!) and those who are not can be relegated never to be seen by you. And you can increasingly use that platform for much more, such as sending money or finding out movie times. SMS or phone calls, on the other hand, have been overrun by spam and unsolicited contacts, often people you have no interest in hearing from.
Just as Google and others have been tackling making good old SMS more useful with the development of RCS, Hiya is attempting to bring back some dignity to the neglected phone dialler by providing a big infusion of data behind the scenes to give you a bigger and better picture of what is going on behind each ring of your phone. It’s coming not a moment too soon, it seems, for carriers who are seeing their core revenues and uses getting hit every day from “over the top” app providers.
“We are restoring trust in the phone call,” Algard says. “There are so many unidentified phone calls coming through and a good portion are unwanted nuisance calls. People are no longer picking up the phone when it rings because of that enormous erosion of trust.”
While Hiya’s first year of business has been focused on inbound calls — essentially the data that you see on your phone screen when a call comes in — the startup is now expanding that to also consider the business opportunity of outbound. It’s building a service for businesses so that they can customise how their calling ID looks when they call people, with more details about addresses and other services, which would come up not just when the call is being made, but when a user looks at a call log later and needs to follow up on something, such as the location of a business and how to get there, or even your purchasing history — say if it’s a pharmacy and you want to track an order of some medicine.
I asked, and Algard was unequivocal in noting that whatever data the company amasses about spammers and unwanted calls comes only from the call log data that the company collects by way of its integrations with carriers — not from the content of the calls themselves.
Still, there is a clear opportunity to start to enhance Hiya — as and when people consent to call recordings, such as in cases of customer service calls — to use natural language processing to analyse conversations and use these to also inform the kind of data that the startup provides both to users and companies, and to help build a better picture of what you, the user, might deem an unwanted call.
“Voice is at the top of the agenda right now when it comes to the user interface,” said Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, Balderton’s partner who led its investment in Hiya and is now also joining the board. That trend will be an interesting one to watch as we start to see tech companies tackle old frontiers like phone calls, as well as new ones.
Hiya is not disclosing its valuation with this round.
Published at Thu, 19 Oct 2017 07:24:09 +0000
