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Numeracle has raised $28 million from Edison Partners to help businesses whose calls are incorrectly labeled as spam or blocked by phone carriers, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively. The McLean, Virginia-based company verifies businesses and links their identities to the phone numbers they use to contact customers. It shares that information with the systems carriers use to screen calls and works to remove incorrect labels. The financing brings Numeracle’s total funding to $34.8 million since its 2018 inception. That total includes a $6.8 million Series A raised in December 2023, founder and CEO Rebekah Johnson told Crunchbase News in an interview. Edison was the sole investor in the new round. Numeracle declined to disclose its valuation. The company says it has roughly 4,000 business customers and about 85 employees. It became profitable this year, sooner than Johnson had expected. Numeracle plans to use its new capital to hire and expand internationally. The company also plans to adapt its business verification tools for use beyond phone calls. For example, Johnson said the company is eyeing messaging, chat apps, marketplaces and AI agents. Its expansion comes as businesses simultaneously face two related problems. For one, fraudsters are increasingly impersonating them. Meanwhile, call-screening systems can prevent their own calls from reaching customers. For example, that could mean a patient ignoring a call from a hospital about an upcoming procedure. For a bank, it could mean a customer declining a legitimate call because the phone displays a fraud warning. Numeracle charges an annual subscription to monitor and address incorrect spam labels. Customers can also pay a per-call fee to display their business name, logo and reason for calling on a recipient’s phone. From a regulatory warning to a company Johnson, an engineer who previously worked in regulatory compliance at telecom provider West, said she recognized the problem while participating in the Federal Communications Commission’s Robocall Strike Force in 2016. She warned carriers that their efforts to identify unwanted calls would also affect legitimate businesses because the screening systems lacked information about who was calling. About three months later, she said, a carrier’s federal regulatory counsel called her while she was in her parents’ kitchen. “Everything you said was going to happen is happening. What do we do?” she recalled him asking. Johnson said that conversation prompted her to start Numeracle. She was a newly single mother who had lost her job and used her life savings to start the business. Living on a farm in Grand Bay, Alabama, without internet access, she worked from cafes. “When you need to feed your children and provide a roof over their head, you’re going to count every penny,” Johnson said. That experience shaped her spending decisions as Numeracle grew, she said. The company operated for several years before raising its Series A. Johnson said about 90% of Numeracle’s sales inquiries come through unpaid inbound channels. With the new funding, she plans to spend more on marketing to specific industries, including healthcare. The company’s customers also include businesses in financial services, home services and higher education, as well as government organizations and charities. Johnson declined to identify individual customers. Verifying increasingly convincing fakes Numeracle first checks that a business is real and does what it claims. Once it passes those checks, the company links it to the phone numbers it uses and shares that information with the systems carriers use to flag or block calls. Other companies can also pay Numeracle to run those checks on businesses they’re considering taking on as customers. Johnson said Numeracle built its own verification tools because existing services weren’t thorough enough. Fraudsters have an incentive to get through: If Numeracle approves them, their calls are less likely to be flagged as spam. AI has made it more difficult to tell which businesses are real, she said. Numeracle has encountered fake companies with state registrations, employer identification numbers and supposed employees who have active LinkedIn profiles. “The scary part for me isn’t necessarily the AI voices,” Johnson said. “It’s actually AI-built businesses.” She said Numeracle uses AI to help identify those fabrications, though she declined to describe the methods in detail. Numeracle currently operates in the United States. Johnson said interest from Europe has prompted it to move forward with its international expansion plans, with some of the new funding going toward that effort. The broader question for the company is whether businesses will pay to use its verification services across other forms of communication. For now, its business centers on a more immediate problem — helping customers recognize a legitimate phone call. Investor POV: ‘Doing more with less’ For Lenard Marcus, a general partner at Edison Partners, Johnson’s telecom and engineering experience was one major reason to invest. In an interview with Crunchbase News, he said her industry knowledge helped her build both the product and relationships with companies that could bring it to customers. He was also drawn to how much Numeracle had accomplished with relatively little funding, describing Johnson as “someone who was frankly doing more with less.” Customer interviews helped make the case. Marcus recalled one contact center operator who said Numeracle had increased the number of calls answered from 19,000 to 22,000 out of 40,000 calls a month. For businesses trying to reach prospective customers, that increase in conversations could lead to more sales. Marcus also believes that Johnson’s years in telecom give Numeracle an advantage over newer competitors. In addition to understanding how the different parts of the industry work together, Johnson has used those relationships to get Numeracle in front of large companies, he said. “She’s sales. She’s engineering, and she’s just a very, very good leader,” Marcus added. Looking ahead, the investor also sees demand across healthcare, retail, home services and finance, with AI making impersonation more prevalent. “This is a communications problem, not one for one industry,” he said. Related Crunchbase query: Illustration: Dom Guzman Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the Crunchbase Daily.
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