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Hiya Raises $18M to Transform Mobile Calling WorldwideSeries A round led by Balderton Capital Balderton's Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen to join the Hiya board Hiya serves 20M users in 196 countries via partnerships with AT&T & Samsung SEATTLE and LONDON, Oct. 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Hiya, the fast-growth startup which makes mobile phone calls more contextual for millions of users, today announced that it has raised $18M in Series A funding to expand globally. The round was led by Balderton Capital, Europe's leading early-stage venture investor, with participation from Nautilus Venture Partners and Lumia Capital. Balderton general partner Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, an early executive at Uber and Dropbox, will join Hiya's board. Founded by serial entrepreneur Alex Algard, Hiya was launched in 2016 to revolutionize the way people make and receive phone calls. The company analyzes more than 3.5B calls per month to provide rich contextual information to users about who is on the other end of the line. Hiya also makes it easier to place outbound calls to businesses by integrating the local search experience directly into the phone's dialer. The company already provides these services to more than 20M users in 196 countries, mainly via partnerships with some of the world's leading carriers and smartphone OEMs including AT&T and Samsung mobile. Headquartered in Seattle, Hiya is rapidly growing with more than 50 employees across four offices worldwide. The new capital will be used for domestic and international expansion, with a significant portion invested in supporting and expanding Hiya's AI and machine learning product roadmap, as well as growing its data and engineering teams. The company plans to double its headcount in the coming year. "As the telecom industry becomes more competitive, leading wireless carriers and smartphone OEMs are adjuting by innovating faster than ever before -- and Hiya is helping them," says the company's CEO Alex Algard, who has re-located to London to oversee Hiya's international expansion. "We are now in hyper-growth mode, and this investment will help sustain our momentum. But we are also benefiting from uniquely relevant strategic and operational know-how for mobile. Lars and Lumia Capital's Chris Rogers, for example, spent many years deep in the trenches as founders or early executives building Uber, Dropbox and Nextel." Global database Hiya Business Profiles, which was launched earlier this year and is available embedded into the dialer functionality for Samsung users as "Samsung Places" in more than 28 countries, enhances the outbound phone call experience between consumers and businesses. With integrated search and discovery, users can quickly find and call any local business directly from Samsung phone dialers, eliminating the need to conduct a web search or open a third-party app. "The Hiya team is embarking on a huge journey to tackle the ever-growing menace of spam and scam calls at a global scale, and in the process, it's building a worldwide database of local businesses," says Balderton's Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, who will be Hiya's fourth board director, alongside Alex Algard, Geoff Entress, Managing Director at Pioneer Square Labs, and Mike McSherry, CEO of Xealth. "We're incredibly excited about the potential of Hiya's contextual technology embedded within the dialer app, which facilitates a connection between local businesses and consumers at the optimal moment." About Hiya About Balderton Capital |