ThinkingPhones Changes Name to Fuze

ThinkingPhones is rebranding to become Fuze, after the company that it bought in November in an effort to grow the video conferencing capabilities of its cloud-based unified communications offerings.

The channel-friendly company has also closed a $112 million round of financing, money that Fuze said that it will use to expand its reach globally and to invest in product innovation, particularly around the effort to simplify business communications.

“Our new company name, Fuze, removes the limitations of ‘ThinkingPhones’ and provides a name suggestive of our vision—a unified platform that seamlessly ‘fuzes’ voice, video and collaboration,” said Fuze CEO Steve Kokinos, who founded ThinkingPhones in 2006. “Our unified platform marries voice, text, messaging, collaboration and video to make communication meaningful and collaboration authentic—all while providing real-time insights that help you work smarter, backed by technology that is intuitive to the individual. This all goes a long way towards making work enjoyable and productive.”

The acquisition of Fuze was part of a major push by ThinkingPhones over the past couple of years to broaden its capabilities and better compete in a growing and fast-changing unified communications (UC) space. The company in August 2014 bought Whaleback, a New Hampshire-based company that provided managed and cloud-based services to midsize companies. In February 2015, ThinkingPhones bought Contactive, which brought analytics to the vendor’s offerings

With Fuze, ThinkingPhones brought in cloud-based video conferencing products that enable people to collaborate across multiple devices using tools like high-definition voice and video as well as content sharing. Fuze also brought with it more than 100,000 customers, including such high-profile names as Groupon, Starbucks and Thoughtworks.

In 2015, ThinkingPhones also added more than 400 new people to its workforce and grew revenues more than 150 percent, and added more than 175 new customers.


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