The Tello team today announced that they have secured $10 million in series B funding, led by Canadian VC BCE Capital. Previous investors Evercore, Rho, Eagle River, and Intel also participated in the round.
I spoke with Tello CEO Doug Renert a couple of weeks ago. He explained their vision as providing unified communications services for small and medium businesses. Just prior to our conversation, Microsoft unveiled it’s unified communications strategy, and shortly after, the Microsoft / Nortel pact was announced. Tello is smart to focus on the small business segment, outside of the focus of these two giants.
If you’re interested in trying Tello, the company has a beta up and running which runs on PCs and Blackberry handhelds. They also have a trial program for Asterisk PBX users, which enables shared presence information between Tello subscribers, and routing between Asterisk PBX’s directly, without traversing the PSTN — ENUM on steroids.
Unusually, neither of these announcements — the funding, nor the Asterisk program — have attracted attention. I don’t understand why.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
