Numeracle, a McLean, Virginia-based company that works to keep legitimate business calls from being mislabeled as spam, has raised $28 million in a funding round led by Edison Partners, which was the sole investor. The company verifies businesses and ties their identities to the phone numbers they use to reach customers, then shares that information with the carrier systems that screen calls and works to clear incorrect labels.
The new financing brings Numeracle's total funding to $34.8 million since it was founded in 2018, including a $6.8 million Series A in December 2023. Founder and CEO Rebekah Johnson said the company declined to disclose its valuation. Numeracle says it serves roughly 4,000 business customers and employs about 85 people, and it became profitable this year, earlier than Johnson expected.
Numeracle plans to spend the capital on hiring and international expansion, and to adapt its verification tools for uses beyond phone calls, including messaging, chat apps, marketplaces and AI agents. The company currently operates only in the United States; Johnson said interest from Europe prompted it to move ahead with its expansion plans, with part of the new funding going toward that effort.
The raise comes as businesses face two connected problems: fraudsters impersonating them, and call-screening systems blocking their own legitimate calls. That can mean a patient ignoring a hospital's call about an upcoming procedure, or a bank customer declining a real call because the phone shows a fraud warning. Numeracle charges an annual subscription to monitor and address incorrect spam labels, and offers a per-call fee for businesses to display their name, logo and reason for calling on a recipient's phone.
Johnson, an engineer who previously worked in regulatory compliance at telecom provider West, said she saw the problem while serving on the Federal Communications Commission's Robocall Strike Force in 2016, where she warned carriers that their efforts to identify unwanted calls would also catch legitimate businesses because the screening systems lacked caller information. About three months later, she said, a carrier's federal regulatory counsel called her to say everything she predicted was happening and asked what to do. A newly single mother who had lost her job, Johnson used her life savings to start the company, working from cafes while living on a farm in Grand Bay, Alabama, without internet access.
Numeracle first checks that a business is real and does what it claims before linking it to its phone numbers and sharing that data with carrier screening systems. Other companies can also pay Numeracle to vet businesses they are considering as customers. Johnson said Numeracle built its own verification tools because existing services were not thorough enough, and that AI has made it harder to tell which businesses are real; the company has encountered fake firms with state registrations, employer identification numbers and supposed employees with active LinkedIn profiles. Numeracle uses AI to help spot such fabrications, though Johnson declined to describe the methods.
Numeracle's customers span financial services, home services, higher education, government organizations and charities, as well as healthcare. Johnson declined to identify individual customers. She said about 90% of the company's sales inquiries arrive through unpaid inbound channels, and that with the new funding she plans to spend more on marketing to specific industries, including healthcare.
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