Hosted VoIP company Telesphere raises $15M

Telesphere, a hosted and managed VoIP services provider based in Phoenix, said it scored a $15 million round of venture funding. The company's previous investors, Rally Capital, Hawkeye Investments LLC and Greenspun Corporation, all participated in the round.

Telesphere CEO Clark Peterson said the company plans to use the capital for acquisition-based expansion into new markets as well as to fuel organic growth. He said Telesphere's sales revenue has increased dramatically over the past eight months as it began to win larger accounts, thus sparking the investments.

"The economic situation has forced bigger enterprises to look closely at how they get their telecommunications services, and they used to have to incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs when expanding locations," Peterson said. "These organizations are now seeing the cost benefits of our hosted VoIP solution. People also have had to do layoffs, and they are now looking for productivity tools they can use to do more with less."

Peterson said Telesphere began to attract more enterprises with multilocation installations, where before, the company's focus was on small- to medium-sized businesses. Now, Peterson said the company operates its systems on dedicated T1 connections, and it controls QoS all the way to the handset on the desk. In its managed installations, Telesphere provides every component of the VoIP system, including racks, routers and handsets.

"We needed a communications system and service to power our business, but we didn't have the luxury of investing a tremendous amount of up-front money," said Daniel Bartlett, president of Wright Engineers, in a release. "With Telesphere we have been able to seamlessly and simply connect all of our business locations with four-digit dialing (so) that one receptionist, in one location, can manage offices in Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California. And we were shocked to learn that it didn't require significant investment to make it all happen."

For more:
- see the Telesphere release here [1]