Fuze Box

FuzeBox, Inc. (Fuze, formerly ThinkingPhones, CallWave, Inc. and Fuze Box, Inc.) is a provider of Internet and mobile based unified communications solutions.

Founded in 2006, Fuze is a private company headquartered in Cambridge, MA with offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, New York, Canada, Amsterdam, UK, Paris, Portugal, Singapore, and Switzerland. In 2015 the company was acquired by Thinking Phone Networks,^[1] and in February 2016 Thinking Phones changed its name to Fuze.^[2]

History

In 2006, founders Jeff Cavins and Mike Buday, started the Fuze product project as an investment thesis while Cavins worked at Azure Capital, a Venture Capital firm in San Francisco, and Mike Buday ran a software company called Intelligent Gadgets. In 2007, when Cavins was recruited by CallWave to replace outgoing CEO and founder, David Hofstatter, Cavins proceeded to bolster the company's aging product strategy and made two acquisitions: Web Messenger located in Sofia, Bulgaria and Intelligent Gadgets, which brought Buday to the company full-time. The Fuze product was developed over the next year and a half and shown as a beta product at the 2008 CTIA show in Las Vegas. Press and media reception to the product was outstanding and the company increased its development efforts. In July 2009, CallWave, the parent company to Fuze, changed its name to FuzeBox (renamed Fuze in 2014). Under the leadership of Jeff Cavins, the company acquired mobile instant messaging client Web Messenger .^[3] and in November 2008, relaunched the product as Fuze Messenger. In May 2009, CallWave announced the release of their web conferencing software, Fuze Meeting, for desktop and mobile devices.

On July 3, 2009, CallWave bought back all public shares in what is known as a take private transaction and delisted itself from NASDAQ.^[4][5]

Just after the take private, in July 2009 the company changed its trade name to FuzeBox. The following year, in January 2010, FuzeBox launched movie-editing software Fuze Movie.,^[6] and in March 2010 the company launched third party Twitter client, Tweetshare.^[7] As of Q4, 2010, the company had over 2.3 ^[8] million subscribers to their platform. As recently as several years ago, the company launched products and services in effort to support their mission to be the next generation visual collaboration leader. In 2011, FuzeBox was featured in Apple’s Global TV Campaign (“We Will Always”, 2011 iPad commercial).^[9]

In 2012, CallWave (parent company to FuzeBox), and its large patent portfolio, were spun out into a newly formed company that retained the name CallWave. Commensurate with the spin-out, a new patent portfolio company was formed and the company recruited Richard Sanders to serve as President and CEO. Sanders had most recently built and led the global IP litigation practice at Cooley, LLP and was recognized as one of the most effective and successful IP attorneys in the world. Also in 2012, FuzeBox raised a Series A financing round of $20M, bringing in new investors, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. In 2013, under Cavins' leadership, the company was recognized by Inc. 500 as the 125th fastest growing company in America, the 23rd in California and the 13th in Silicon Valley.^[10] in Sept 2013, the company announced that it had raised a Series B financing of $26M and hired new executives from Yammer. In September, David Obrand was announced as CEO and a few months later Cavins left the board to pursue other business ventures. In late 2014 co-founder of Hermes Growth Partners, Bobby Yerramilli-Rao was named CEO and Charlie Newark-French was named President of Fuze.

Products and services

Fuze is a cloud-based visual communications solution. Fuze is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, and Android devices.

The company's main product combines business voice, video, text (SMS),^[11] instant messaging and presence indication under one cloud service delivered both to traditional desk phones and mobile devices. Services like this can be used to replace a company's existing private branch exchange (PBX) typically located in the building with a cloud or IP PBX.^[12]

The company also provides a hosted contact center marketed to customer support and sales operations.

References