Silicon Valley based RingCentral offers businesses a virtual telephone system (they say “Sound more professional, look like a bigger company”). It’s sort of a super-Vonage, but targeted to businesses first. And they have a lot more features, including a virtual PBX to manage multiple lines and “greetings recorded by professional voice talent.”
The company took $12 million in late 2007 from Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. Today they announced a second round, also $12 million. The round was led by DAG Ventures, which often follows Sequoia and other well known venture capitalists in second, more expensive rounds.
Kudos!
wow, super cool, I never knew this was a service I could buy. Thanks for the heads-up techcrunch, I going to buy this.
I used RingCentral before and they are amazing, this is a company that does eveything right. Service options, customer service, user interface. Love these folks.
Can anyone say Google? Grand central is already doing this and more for personal use. I can only assume it’s just a matter of time before they throw their hat in and start to support 1800 numbers.
I use RingCentral as well and it is awesome. Glad to see they’re getting more funding.
@Jesus H Christ
one track mind? you CAN do business with more than just one company.
I also use Ring Central and it has done a great job for our company. Our employees are around the country (no central office) and their service is a very affordable way to have a phone system with extensions and a cohesive and professional feel.
Its always nice to see a quality product get support from VC
I currently use GotVmail. I would be curious the advantages of this over any of the competitors. I would also be curious if the phone numbers that people use with these services are transferable to another service or if you are locked into dealing with them for essentially the entire time you are in business.
You have a typo in there. You wrote RingCentral instead of GrandCentral.
No API = No Good.
Also, you should mention vocalocity.com, they’re not the best, but they’re funded and offer a similar service.
@4
You have missed a HUGE difference between GrandCentral and RingCetral.
Grandcentral was acquired for $50M with its only product in beta. They have ZERO revenue.
On the other hand RingCentral really does have a business. According to the press release they have 50,000 paying customers. There most popular package is $30 per month. Assuming that the ave price is $30 per month this gives RingCentral $1.5M per month ($18M/year).
As I mentioned in an earlier post. GrandCentral took Google to the bank!! My guesstimate is a valuation – post money round of $70M to $80M.
@11
Agreed. Any closed platform (no api) will not survive. I wouldn’t be surprised to see one published soon (though they are working with MSFT)
Looks good. I hope RingCentral doesn’t make the foolish mistake the idiots at ph0ne.com did, and try to sell swindle customers with metered phone service providing allocations of only 43 minutes/month per employee (in their ridiculous “business” plans). LOL!
We use gotvmail.com for the same service. So far, great experience, low price, good service with real humans who answer the phone.
Transparency Disclaimer – This comment is a plug for RingBranch, but I wanted to mention it, as we are offering a somewhat similar service for T-Mobile and Alltel customers, and it’s free during our beta. We will be expanding into local national numbers soon, as we just launched a few weeks ago and we’re developing new features as quickly as possible.
Thanks.
ML asked if the phone numbers are transferable. I’m from RingCentral, and the answer is yes.
Michael — instead of citing the company press release (with an attribution, italics *and* quotation marks) why don’t you give it a try it? You might like it.
I’ve used RingCentral for over a year for my fax server. No more! The Customer Service is one of the worst I have encountered on the Internet and otherwise. In fact, to date, I have never received a valid and substantive response to any of my concerns. Instead, I receive sophomoric emails that scold and threaten, as if the customer is a child. The emails require I re-posit my information between two lines…or else. Complying with these emails only triggers the exact same response. The entire process is a cycle of failure. Consequently, I am switching fax servers, and making the recommendation to 148 other companies that I am associated with to avoid RingCentral like they would a plague.
I use both GotVmail and RingCentral. I’ll probably be opening another account with RingCentral today or tomorrow. I’m more impressed with RingCentral’s service. I’m happy they got additional funding. Hopefully it will mean even better features and service.
RingCentral is way easier to configure than gotvmail IMO
Interface is easier to use.
I have used ringcentral, vmail, and freedomvoice.com I like freedomvoice over all for remote applications
there is also VirtualPBX which is based in San Jose
BT’s (British Telecom) offers ‘BT RingCentral’ based on RingCentral’s platform, so no doubt that will provide a good source of income.
Looking at the features of it this morning the only disadvantage is the inbound call rates by having to use an 0800 or 0844 number. In BT’s case it would be more of an advantage to offer 0845/0870 where the customer can pay the calls to lower the overall cost of using the service (like DMClub).
Another option for small businesses is Toktumi (say “Talk to Me”):
http://www.toktumi.com
They have a free version (where they assign you a number) and a paid version. Its a fairly simple interface and has a very simple pricing structure.
Cool. But what the hell are they funding with all of this?!!
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hi joe i agree with u. Phonepeople.com is very simple to use and also very low charge. i have also used services from other provider like ring central but i prefer phonepeople.com as it is best
GotVMail does the same, but also supports 1-800 numbers, which is a plus !
@randy – what the heck are you talking about for phone.com? I use them and love their support. I looked at all the companies out there and Phone.com seems to have the best pricing…just compare their pricing and plans. I don’t know how you come up with some metered service, but I like them.
There is a genuine need for companies like Ringcentral, Toktumi, and Phone.com. The SOHO and micro-enterprises’ needs are not adequately served by the large companies. In addition these service providers have the capability to pull in non-US customers as well due to the hosted nature of their setup.
If you plan to use RingCentral, take a look at PhonePeople too, and vice verse.
PhonePeople seems more cost effective, and I have talked to their support at both places. Very courtous and professional.
I am actively looking for a service like this so that I can manage my small business calls. I tried RingCentral’s 1-week free trial. Today I cancelled because out of about 10 test calls to my RingCentral phone number, more than half today could not be completed. Some of the calls were greeted with a message that the circuits were busy. Some just made a bad noise (sort of like the noise it makes when your phone is off the hook). I am not willing to lose even one client because my phone system is second-rate. I spent half an hour on their customer service line, where I doubt they ever believed me that my calls were not going through, because they did not appear on my account’s call log. (Duh. They didn’t get that far.)
I will not be back, but thanks everyone for the additional ideas.
I signed up for Ring Central on a debit card. I then tried to move the billing to a different debit card and had a horrible customer service experience. After many, many repeated attemps to change billing sources, I finally gave up! Imagine this, I was trying to PAY Ring Central and couldn’t do it. What happens when I have a problem? Plus, customer service (or should I say NO service) was in another contry. I was difficult to understand them.
Disclaimer – A vote for the vendor we use – VirtualPBX.com has been doing this for over 10 years and seem to have it right. We have used them and the support is in the US, the service is rock solid. Recently they dropped their prices. They may not have as much bling as ringcentral but the business features like acd queues cant be touched by any one else.
I have tried several companies including several ones mention above but settled on http://www.reachme.com because they have the best service. After several years, I never had a busy signal and I never had to think too much about programming my numbers and extensions for my employees because they did it for me. Customer service is always available and excellent; every question is answered.
I’ve used RingCentral for several businesses since 2003. That’s six years, and they’ve been rock solid all along. The interface has evolved to add more features, but there is no “feature creep” feel to it and we are now putting our entire office on a combo of Digital Lines and their Linksys desk phones. As prior commentary has noted, they serve the SOHO market well. We have 5 employees, and about $200/mo total for our telecom expense. Amazing.
My wife has been using RingCentral for about 18 months and while the service is generally good she gets several “All Circuits Busy” messages each month when she tries to call her own number to retrieve voice-mail, and several of her clients have reported the same issue — all in the afternoon during peack business times and never in the morning or evening — which tells me they way oversubscribe their incoming trunk lines. We cannot afford to potentially lose an incoming client so we are moving to another provider.
We contact their support people but they were totally useless — their Tier 2 guy could not even understand the problem.
Too bad, we like everything else.
I am reltatively new to RingCentral, but everything, and i mean everything has been amazing. The User Interface is simple, unlike phone.com. It has every tool that i can think of. I am sure they have more coming.
I am a very pleased user of RC, and will hope they continue to grow.
They are completely different than GrandCentral, and should not be compared at all to that concept.