For a company that sells telephones, Aircall started with an odd problem: nobody in a small business wanted to think about the phone. Landlines meant engineers, contracts and hardware. Sales teams wanted calls to show up inside the software where they already worked.
That gap is what four people spotted in Paris in 2014: Olivier Pailhes, Jonathan Anguelov, Pierre-Baptiste Bechu and Xavier Durand. Their product was a cloud phone system for small and mid-sized companies, priced at roughly EUR 30 to EUR 50 a month and plugged into CRM and helpdesk tools. It was the kind of idea that sounds obvious once someone has built it.
What the milestones show is a company that kept widening its footprint rather than changing its idea.
The biggest choice came in 2017. French software companies often stay home for years. Aircall instead opened in New York to chase American customers, and its revenue tripled that year. It is a decision that many European founders postpone and later regret postponing.
Money followed the traction. In 2018 Draper Esprit, NextWorld Capital and Newfund put in USD 29 million. In May 2020, as remote work turned the phone into a distributed tool, a USD 65 million round brought total funding above USD 100 million, with Balderton and eFounders among the backers. Then in June 2021 Goldman Sachs led a USD 120 million round, making Aircall the 16th French unicorn.
What the milestones show is a company that kept widening its footprint rather than changing its idea. It added offices in Madrid, Seattle, London and Sydney and, by 2022, annual recurring revenue passed USD 100 million. In 2024 it turned ten and opened an office in San Francisco. It now serves more than 24,000 customers.
The next test is the same one facing every phone company: what a call is when software can answer it. In 2026 Aircall bought Vogent, a maker of AI voice agents, in May and Piper AI, a revenue-intelligence and coaching tool, in June. The bet is that the call stays at the centre of a sales team's day, and that the conversation can be understood, scored and sometimes answered by software.
There is a lesson for a first-time founder here that has nothing to do with phones. Aircall did not need to reinvent the product to survive. It moved to the biggest market early, listened to where customers already worked, and bought its way into the next shift when the last one matured.