The seed funding, led by Bonfire Ventures, will allow the Los Angeles tech startup to meet the exploding demand from SaaS verticals to build messaging services into their software applications

Telgorithm Inc., a Los Angeles-based cloud communications technology startup, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding to further develop and enhance its compliance-based messaging platform for SaaS providers.

The funding, led by Bonfire Ventures with participation from Daher Capital, Amplify.LA, and I2BF, will allow the tech startup to expand its existing robust messaging APIs to include a cloud-based voice communications platform. Today, Telgorithm offers hosted messaging services that allow SaaS providers to bring text messaging to their core platforms on an Application to Person (A2P) messaging via a standard 10-digit-long code (10DLC) and toll-free telephone numbers.

“Bonfire invests exclusively in B2B software businesses, so we have a clear understanding of the benefits of Telgorithm’s tight focus on SaaS vendors as customers for their communications solutions,” said Jim Andelman, co-founder and managing director of Bonfire Ventures. “Telgorithm helps SaaS vendors deliver more value to their end customers and drive superior business performance. It’s a huge market opportunity. We love that the founders previously worked together and brought very similar products to market for the same use-case, so the ‘founder-market fit’ here is simply off the charts. We are very excited to be supporting Telgorithm and these founders as the company grows.”

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Telgorithm started in May 2021 after its founders saw a need for a comprehensive business telecom and messaging platform. Its founders have a collective 18 years of experience in the telecommunications industry including in the wireless, VoIP and SaaS industries, giving them unique perspectives from both the customer & provider sides.

“We’re a truly transparent communications platform that empowers SaaS providers to validate, build, deploy, maintain, and scale communications with ease,” said Aaron Alter, Telgorithm’s co-founder and CEO. “Whether it’s a small to mid-sized or enterprise customer, our platform and APIs enable the product manager to bring messaging features that are compliant and reliable to market without the guesswork.”

Alter, who spent nearly five years as the head of ServiceTitan’s telecommunications division and worked as director of telecommunications for SignalWire prior to co-founding Telgorithm, said the company’s revolutionary platform will help SaaS providers maneuver the challenges of moving from Person-to-Person (P2P) Short Messaging Services (SMS) to A2P messaging while maintaining the compliance needed to adhere with Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) regulations. In the last few years, mobile operators have demanded that commercial messaging move from P2P to A2P because the volume made it difficult for carriers to protect their end users from unwanted messages.

“Tackling compliance-based messaging was just the beginning for Telgorithm,” he said. “By offering high throughput 10DLC and guaranteed message deliverability, we are setting a higher bar for messaging services. Separately, we’re very passionate about voice products that enable end-customers of SaaS providers to generate more revenue and find new ways to improve call efficiency. That is why we’re tackling voice next.”

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Co-Founder and COO Mason Zheng, a veteran business operations consultant and former manager for ServiceTitan, KPMG US and other top organizations, said Telgorithm’s platform aims to speed up a product manager’s go-to-market journey by bringing a new level of attainability to SaaS verticals looking to offer telecom features that can easily be integrated into their core applications.

“We believe that SaaS providers are missing mission critical communication features because it is inherently difficult to bring together product, engineering, and design with the added layers of regulatory compliance,” Zheng said. “Our mission is to make deploying and maintaining messaging and, eventually, voice features so frictionless that product managers can focus more on shipping and less on fixing.”

From his experience as a telecom team leader for ServiceTitan, Telgorithm Co-Founder and CTO Yury Semerikov found gaps in telecom platform offerings. Semerikov added that the company strives to create a cohesive experience for customers serving a variety of industries.

“We couldn’t find any providers that offered functionalities like building messaging queues to adding additional redundancies,” he said. “At the end of the day, we needed to offer the best telecom experience, and we had to build all of it ourselves.”

Telgorithm’s goal is to launch a voice product to help SaaS providers accelerate their go-to-market journey across the communication stack so that product managers aren’t spending 12-18 months figuring out the building blocks to get a product to market.

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