Numeracle has secured $28 million from Edison Partners to address a growing problem: legitimate business calls being mislabeled as spam or blocked by phone carriers. The McLean, Virginia-based company, founded in 2018, verifies the identities of businesses and connects those identities to the phone numbers they use, then shares that data with the screening systems carriers rely on to filter calls. The new investment brings the company's total capital raised to $34.8 million, including a $6.8 million Series A completed in December 2023.
The company now serves roughly 4,000 business clients across healthcare, financial services, home services, higher education, government agencies, and nonprofits, with around 85 staff members. Numeracle reached profitability earlier this year, ahead of founder and CEO Rebekah Johnson's expectations. Edison Partners was the sole backer in the latest round, though the company declined to share its current valuation. Johnson told Crunchbase News that approximately 90% of the company's sales inquiries arrive through unpaid inbound channels, reflecting strong organic demand for its services.
According to Johnson, the idea for Numeracle emerged in 2016 when she participated in the Federal Communications Commission's Robocall Strike Force while working in regulatory compliance at telecom provider West. She warned carriers that their anti-robocall efforts would inadvertently harm legitimate businesses because screening systems lacked adequate information about caller identities. About three months later, a carrier's regulatory counsel contacted her to report that her predictions had come true, prompting her to launch the business as a newly single mother using her life savings. Lenard Marcus, a general partner at Edison Partners, said Johnson's telecom and engineering background was a major factor in the investment decision, noting she's "someone who was frankly doing more with less." He recalled one contact center operator reporting that Numeracle increased answered calls from 19,000 to 22,000 out of 40,000 monthly attempts.
Numeracle plans to deploy the fresh capital for hiring and international expansion, particularly into Europe where interest has been strong. The company also intends to adapt its business verification tools beyond phone calls to areas like messaging platforms, chat applications, marketplaces, and AI agents. Johnson explained that AI has made verification more challenging, with fraudsters creating fake companies complete with state registrations, employer identification numbers, and employees with active LinkedIn profiles. "The scary part for me isn't necessarily the AI voices," she said. "It's actually AI-built businesses." The company now uses AI-powered methods to detect these fabrications, though Johnson declined to detail the specific techniques. Marcus believes the demand will grow across multiple sectors as AI makes impersonation more convincing, calling it "a communications problem, not one for one industry." For businesses trying to connect with customers, the stakes are clear: a hospital's call about an upcoming procedure might go unanswered, or a bank's legitimate outreach could be declined because the recipient sees a fraud warning.