Regal.io, Which Offers Event-Driven, Branded Phone Calls for Online Brands, Raises $38.5M Series a From Emergence Capital

Regal.io’s outbound phone and SMS sales solution sees 36% average answer rate, 3.6x industry average, leading to ten million conversations that generated over $500M in revenue for its customers in 20 months since launch.

Regal.io, the outbound phone and SMS sales solution, announced that it has raised $38.5 million in Series A funding led by Emergence Capital. Existing investors Founder Collective and Homebrew also participated, and were joined by Flex Capital, Inspired Capital, Operator Collective, and executives from industry-leading sales and marketing companies including Braze, HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoom. Regal.io previously raised an unannounced $3.6 million Seed round bringing the total raised to date to $42.1 million.

Driving growth is the top priority for online brands. As deploying digital marketing dollars becomes table stakes, the focus has shifted to efficiently converting the 95%+ of prospective customers that ‘abandon’ the self-serve online flows. Regal.io is an event-driven customer engagement system that proactively triggers branded calls and texts at key moments – like when customers ‘abandon’ the sign up or checkout flow. Regal.io drives human intervention from brands’ sales or customer service teams that converts more customers, resulting in 25% more revenue for brands using Regal.io.

“Every digital brand uses a stack of one-way marketing automation tools to try and re-market to ‘abandoned’ customers, and they are seeing diminishing returns in those one-way channels,” says Alex Levin, Regal.io Co-Founder and CEO. “The key to higher conversion is conversations. Regal.io’s solution leverages event-driven customer engagement to drive a conversation with a knowledgeable human at key moments — it’s the personal touch for the digital marketing age.”

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100+ customers use Regal.io including Angi (formerly Angie’s List), Career Karma, Fidelity Life, RefiJet, Ro (parent company to Roman), SoFi and The Farmer’s Dog. Regal.io is aimed primarily at “high consideration” consumer businesses like healthcare, insurance, lending, local services, education, and subscription ecommerce, which represent more than half of the consumer economy.

Key features of Regal.io’s solution:

• Drag-and-drop Regal.io Journey Builder enables managers to trigger and personalize call and text journeys to high-intent buyers at the right moments based on large volumes of real-time event data streamed to Regal.io. The data comes via native integrations or APIs, and includes customer website usage, CRM data, and other behavioral time series data.
• Regal.io Branded Caller ID for cell phones (different from landline caller id, also known as CNAM) changes the caller id on cell phones from an unknown number to the name of the brand so the customer knows who is calling. No customer opt in or integration is required to brand calls on all 400 million cell phones in the US.
• Regal.io Unified Agent Desktop gives sales teams a unified call and text message tool, and timely, intelligent information about where the customer is in the process and where they got stuck.

After their experience building a phone sales team at Angi (NASDAQ: ANGI) on traditional omnichannel contact center software, Alex Levin and Rebecca Greene realized there had been a massive underinvestment in outbound calling technology, which limited how sales and marketing teams could use the channel. They founded Regal.io to build an entirely new tech stack for powering calls that would provide customers a better experience, and give brands the tools to drive more revenue though this critical channel.

In the 20 months since launch, Regal.io has grown to 80+ staff serving 100+ customers. The company currently powers more than a million conversations a month, which drive over $50 million in monthly revenue for Regal.io’s customers. That success for customers has translated into 34% MoM revenue growth for Regal.io since launch.

Oisin Hanrahan, Angi CEO and an investor in Regal.io has had a great view of the founding and growth, “Regal has helped our teams massively increase revenue from customers via branded, personalized call and text message outreach – all features that our existing customer service contact center software didn’t have.”

SoFi’s VP, Performance Marketing, Kevin Heung, explained, “After seeing Regal increase our answer rates on outbound phone sales and getting great feedback about the branded calls, we were able to leverage Regal to quickly scale up a phone sales program as we continue to grow our business.”

The company will use the new funds to continue to invest in its go-to-market and engineering teams. As part of the fundraise, Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital, will join the board of directors.

“Regal.io has incredible founder-market fit. It’s rare to find a team that has experience leading large, complex call centers and has also worked on modern, data-driven, performance marketing and sales teams,” said Jake. “Regal also has amongst the strongest product-market fit we’ve ever seen, a core reason why it’s growing faster than even Zoom did at a similar stage.”

“I am impressed with how fast Regal.io came out of the gate. Regal has an enormous opportunity in front of them, and they are executing flawlessly,” added Satya Patel, a General Partner at investor Homebrew.

“Regal.io is filling a critical market need, and most impressively, I’ve heard rave reviews from our other portfolio companies that have become Regal power users,” said David Frankel, Managing Partner at investor Founder Collective.

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