We want to congratulate the team at NewVoiceMedia on finding their new home with Vonage, yesterday’s announcement is a reflection of their years of hard work and dedication. CEO Denis Fois, has done a great job driving the business to this outcome, building on the scale-up journey that previous CEO, Jonathan Gale, led the business through with the counsel of chairman, Guy Dubois. For the founders Ashley Unitt, Chief Scientist, and Richard Pickering this result must be the realisation of their ambition and vision for the company.
We believed in the potential of NewVoiceMedia from an early stage and it has been a privilege to have played a small part in its journey since the series B in early 2013. MMC has always looked for disruptive technologies in large markets. What excited us about NewVoiceMedia back then was that, unlike traditional solutions of the time, NewVoiceMedia’s customers did not require any on-premise equipment and no desktop installation, just a phone and a browser. That may seem typical now but NewVoiceMedia was offering one of the first full SaaS solutions for contact centres.
Our investment in NewVoiceMedia came at a time when there was a surge of SaaS investments by European VCs, including MMC (back then we were talking about ‘cloud’ as a category). At the time there were very few large-scale success stories in European SaaS, and not many UK companies playing a big part in the Salesforce ecosystem. We’ve now backed more than 20 fast-growth SaaS businesses, and these days it’s incredible to believe that anyone would build a software platform that isn’t cloud-native.
Working with NewVoiceMedia as the team faced some of the challenges on their journey, such as scaling its sales and marketing team, expansion into the US and navigating the funding ladder, has taught us valuable lessons as well. Those learnings have helped us as a firm deepen our understanding so that we can provide better support to management teams as they face similar hurdles. So, thank you to Jonathan, Ashley, colleagues and co-investors over the years for sharing that experience with us.
One such lesson for us was that you can build large B2B companies outside of London. The team at NewVoiceMedia built the business from an early-stage company based in Basingstoke, UK (a town of 100,000 people) to a global technology supplier with customers across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.
Since our investment in NewVoiceMedia we have been privileged to back companies such as Peak in Manchester, Brightpearl in Bristol, Invenias in Reading and another Hampshire-based business, Senseye in Southampton.
One of the things we pride ourselves on as a firm is that we help to build sustainable, category-leading businesses, not just a series of big outcomes. NewVoiceMedia has scaled to become a leader in its field and employs hundreds in the UK and around the world. We’re delighted that the business has found the right acquirer in Vonage and we’re excited to see what comes next as it goes through its next phase of growth.