Edify Labs raises $10 million seed funding; investment among 2019’s top 10 largest software seed rounds in U.S. and globally

Edify Labs, a software tech startup that’s redefining the way businesses manage customer engagement and cross-team collaboration, announced it has closed a $10 million round of seed funding to expand Edify’s market presence and continue building the sales, marketing, development, and customer success teams. This is among the four largest software seed rounds raised in the United States, and among the 10 largest in the world, this year.

The round was led by San Francisco-based First Round Capital, a venture capital firm whose partners worked with brands like Uber, Roblox, and Warby Parker when they were emerging. Other investors in this round include Anorak Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures, Morado Venture Partners, Bling Capital, Bonfire Ventures, SeaLane Ventures, and Liquid 2 Ventures.

Founded in 2018 by co-founders, Cameron Weeks and Bracken Fields, the Santa Monica Edify connects businesses with customers and employees with each other. The co-founders have more than a decade of experience in this space. They started their first company, Sharpen, while roommates at Purdue.

Earlier this year Edify launched its cloud-native Business Communications as a Service (BCaaS) platform solution (Edify Huddle), giving the contact center space the familiar omnichannel capabilities we have in our personal lives. Edify Huddle aims to make company-to-customer and employer-employee interactions easy, intuitive, and simply put, better. Huddle is the only one uniting unified communications (UC), contact center (CC) and communications platform (API) functionality in a single, cloud-native software solution that lets users move seamlessly among channels within one conversation. Edify removes all the risk of using its platform with five free users forever, global availability, real-time redundancy, usage-based pricing, and a 100% SLA uptime guarantee.

“The hard truth no one has wanted to confront is that existing contact center technology lags astonishingly far behind the technology we all carry around in our pockets, and we decided that’s just not acceptable anymore,” said Cameron Weeks, Edify co-founder and CEO. “This investment underscores that Edify has developed an industry-altering platform and will enable us to continue to augment our team with the most forward-thinking leaders in machine learning, cloud computing, real-time communication, and customer experience to finally give employees and customers the technology they need and deserve.”

Edify’s partner and board member at First Round Capital, Bill Trenchard, has deep contact center and customer experience industry knowledge, having founded and led LiveOps — a 20,000+ agent business process outsourcer (BPO) — to $100 million in revenue. LiveOps also became the foundation of a cloud contact center solution provider which still operates today. Throughout his career, Trenchard founded four other companies, one of which was acquired by Microsoft.

“First Round partners with founders who are exceptionally productive, know how and when to push their teams, and move with grace and speed,” said Trenchard. “Sometimes an entrepreneur like that comes along with an idea to change an industry that has been the same for decades, and we want to get involved. When systems are big and broken at multiple points, they’re ripe with opportunity. With great execution, they can transform the lives of thousands or millions of people and that’s why we’ve chosen Edify.”

Edify co-founders Weeks and Bracken Fields, also CTO, founded the company in their home state of Indiana in October 2018. Building on the core belief that businesses should not be trapped by expensive, stale, cumbersome technology, they invented a unified, omnichannel platform to manage internal and external communications.

With a small team beside them, the duo launched Edify Huddle in June 2019 in response to the long-stagnant contact center (CC) and unified communications (UC) technology landscape. Uniting UC, CC and communications platform (CPaaS/API) functionality in a single, cloud-native software solution, Edify Huddle lets users move seamlessly among channels within one conversation. This frictionless transfer capability gives agents the ultimate flexibility to interact with customers, one another, and internal subject matter experts to solve problems quickly and completely from a single pane of glass.