Lancashire telecoms startup nabs £1.5m in seed funding

CircleLoop, a provider of cloud-based phone systems for businesses, has secured £1.5m in an initial seed funding round.

The Rossendale-based startup, which is aiming to take on traditional telecoms providers with its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model and simple self-service applications, plans to use the seven-figure boost to scale its operations.

Having spent spent most of 2017 in beta, CircleLoop has been on-boarding new customers quickly since releasing its new desktop apps for Mac and Windows, alongside improving its iOS and Android mobile apps.

The firm will use its new funding to accelerate growth in the UK market. The plan is to integrate CircleLoop with other complementary SaaS products, starting with a focus on customer relationship management (CRM) tools.

The business is also driving forward with a number of partnership deals – among them an agreement to become a preferred telephony partner of e-commerce platform EKM, which hosts one-fifth of Britain’s online shops. The deal has enabled CircleLoop to offer its telephony services to EKM’s 25k customers.

Damian Hanson, who co-founded the company with business partner David Hague, said: “We believe the telecoms market in the UK remains painful and unnecessarily expensive for many businesses.

“With CircleLoop, we believe we’re developing something that will be truly different in the market. At last, there’s a telecoms challenger that will confront the ‘norms’ we have, until now, just had to accept.”

CircleLoop Co-founder David commented: “Whilst we are just getting started with our vision for CircleLoop we believe we have already developed something which is being welcomed in the market and we look forward to working closely with our valued customers and partners to make CircleLoop a next generation telco.”