Draper Esprit leads $29m funding round for Aircall

Dublin and London-listed venture capital firm Draper Esprit has led a $29 million (€24.5 million) funding round for Aircall, a French cloud-based call centre software business.

The VC fund invested €11.4 million in the firm while NextWorld Capital, Balderton Capital and Newfund also participated.

Aircall, which has raised $40.5 million to date, was founded in 2014 by Jonathan Anguelov, Olivier Pailhès, Pierre-Baptiste Béchu and Xavier Durand.

The company, which has over 3,000 business customers, develops self-service software-only phone system and call centre software. The solution offers instant phone numbers in over 40 countries, provides a collaborative phone app to let teams share and follow-up on calls and connects to any CRM or customer support tool, such as Intercom.

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Draper Esprit is led in Ireland by Brian Caulfield, who is also a member of The Irish Times board. The company has previously backed a number of big name tech firms including Clavis Insight, Movidius and TransferWise.

The VC-firm has been busy this year with a number of big investments. These include co-leading a $12.3 million (€9.9 million) funding round for Evonetix, a UK-company developing a novel gene synthesis platform. It also participated in a €75 million Series B funding round for Ledger, a French cryptocurrency and blockchain security company.

Draper Esprit also committed up to $16.5 million in digital banking alternative Revolut’s latest funding round.

Last month it announced it has sold portfolio company Tail. com, one of five disposals made by the firm over the past year.