Spoke Phone Raises $4.5 Million to Migrate Legacy Phone Systems to the Cloud

Mobile voice company Spoke Phone today announced it has raised $US4.5 million in Series A funding, in a capital raising round led by Australian venture capital firm, Marbruck Investments, with support from New Zealand-based Icehouse Ventures and Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1 fund.

Spoke Phone is a mobile-first business phone system that offers the same powerful features and integrations available to desktop users via their mobile phones. Globally, there are more than 5,640 business phone providers offering VoIP (Voice over Internet calling) solutions, with Spoke Phone being the only solution designed specifically for mobile.

Co-founders Jason Kerr and Kieron Lawson built Spoke Phone because they saw a “mobile-first” future where employees prefer using a mobile phone, and where companies have more mobile and remote workers.

“With 50% of the workforce expected to be mobile or remote by 2025, enterprises need to enable workers with fully-integrated mobile-first business tools,” says Mr Kerr. To prepare for this change, Mr Kerr says businesses of all sizes are undertaking expansive digital transformation and cloud migration projects, with Spoke Phone set to play a large part in this journey. As a sign of how far the mobile-first movement has come, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently revealed it’s been years since he’s used a computer, rather he runs the $143 billion company from his phone.

Mr. Kerr continued: “Current phone systems are designed for desk users, not mobile users. They have significant limitations and with advances such as 5G and better battery life, a mobile-first future is within sight.”

The investment will be used to further enhance the capability of Spoke Phone’s existing business phone solution, accelerate expansion in Australia and the United States, and commercialize Spoke Phone for enterprise, a new solution that helps large customers stuck on legacy phone systems effortlessly migrate to the cloud.

“One of the riskiest and most disruptive cloud transformations companies face is how to get off their legacy phone system,” says Lachlan Clough, a partner with Marbruck Investments. “We invested in Spoke Phone because their technology gives companies a risk-free and non-disruptive way to gently migrate legacy phone systems to the cloud.”

Thousands of companies are stuck on unsupported legacy phone systems with limited or no mobility, facing significant business disruption, cost, and risk to move to a more modern cloud solution.

Spanning from smb to enterprise companies, Spoke’s new product works to safely migrate business communications to the cloud in a series of risk-free steps that can be done while existing supplier contracts run their course. It means companies no longer need to risk changing everything in one go.

Mr Kerr cites a recent new customer, a large commercial insurance provider in Australia. “As a large insurance provider, they could not risk making a wholesale change to their phone system. Retraining employees, rolling out new hardware, and changing the customer experience all at the same time, is just too much risk. They were able to implement Spoke Phone over top of their legacy phone system while also integrating with Twilio and Amazon as part of their larger cloud migration journey.”