Numeracle Lands $28M to Combat Spam Labeling of Legitimate Business Calls

Numeracle, a business verification platform based in McLean, Virginia, has secured $28 million in funding from Edison Partners. The investment will support the company's efforts to prevent legitimate business calls from being mislabeled as spam or blocked by telecommunications carriers.

The company operates by authenticating businesses and connecting their verified identities to the phone numbers they use when contacting customers. Numeracle then shares this information with the call-screening systems that carriers employ to filter unwanted calls, working to correct inaccurate spam designations.

This funding round brings Numeracle's cumulative capital raised to $34.8 million since the company was founded in 2018. The total includes a $6.8 million Series A completed in December 2023, according to founder and CEO Rebekah Johnson. Edison Partners was the sole investor in this latest round, and the company has not disclosed its valuation.

Numeracle currently serves approximately 4,000 business customers and employs about 85 people. The company achieved profitability this year, earlier than Johnson anticipated.

The new capital will support hiring and geographic expansion into international markets. Numeracle also intends to extend its verification capabilities beyond phone communications to encompass messaging platforms, chat applications, online marketplaces and AI agents.

Businesses face a dual challenge that Numeracle addresses. Fraudsters increasingly impersonate legitimate companies, while simultaneously, call-screening technology can prevent authentic business calls from reaching customers. A hospital's reminder call about a patient's upcoming procedure might be ignored if flagged as fraud, or a bank's legitimate customer service call could be declined due to a fraud warning displayed on the recipient's phone.

Numeracle's revenue model includes annual subscriptions that monitor and correct incorrect spam labels. Customers can also pay per-call fees to display their business name, logo and calling purpose on recipients' phones.

From regulatory insight to startup founding

Johnson, an engineer with prior experience in regulatory compliance at telecom firm West, identified the problem while serving on the Federal Communications Commission's Robocall Strike Force in 2016. She cautioned carriers that their call-screening initiatives would inadvertently harm legitimate businesses because these systems lacked caller identification information.

Three months later, a carrier's federal regulatory counsel contacted Johnson to discuss the issue. "Everything you said was going to happen is happening. What do we do?" she recalled him asking. This conversation motivated her to establish Numeracle.

Johnson was a newly single parent who had lost employment and invested her personal savings to launch the business. Working from cafes in Grand Bay, Alabama, where she lived on a farm without reliable internet, she bootstrapped the operation. "When you need to feed your children and provide a roof over their head, you're going to count every penny," Johnson said. This frugal mindset influenced her financial management as Numeracle developed, with the company operating for several years before securing Series A funding.

Approximately 90 percent of Numeracle's sales leads originate through unpaid inbound channels. With the new investment, Johnson plans to increase marketing spending focused on specific sectors, particularly healthcare. The company's customer base spans financial services, home services, higher education, as well as government agencies and nonprofit organizations. Johnson declined to name specific clients.

Detecting increasingly sophisticated fraudulent operations

Numeracle's verification process begins by confirming that a business is legitimate and operates as represented. After passing these checks, the company associates the business with its phone numbers and provides this data to carrier systems that determine whether to flag or block calls. Other companies can also engage Numeracle to verify businesses they are considering as partners or vendors.

Johnson explained that Numeracle developed proprietary verification tools because existing services lacked sufficient rigor. Fraudsters have strong motivation to bypass Numeracle's checks: approval means their calls face lower likelihood of spam flagging.

Artificial intelligence has made distinguishing authentic businesses from fabricated ones increasingly difficult, Johnson noted. Numeracle has encountered fake companies with state business registrations, employer identification numbers and purported employees maintaining active LinkedIn profiles. "The scary part for me isn't necessarily the AI voices," Johnson said. "It's actually AI-built businesses." Numeracle employs AI to detect these fabrications, though Johnson declined to elaborate on specific methods.

Numeracle presently operates exclusively in the United States. European interest has prompted the company to accelerate international expansion plans, with a portion of the new funding allocated to this initiative. The broader strategic question centers on whether businesses will adopt Numeracle's verification services across other communication channels. Currently, the company focuses on resolving the immediate challenge of enabling customers to recognize legitimate phone calls.

Investor perspective: accomplishing more with limited resources

Lenard Marcus, a general partner at Edison Partners, cited Johnson's telecommunications and engineering background as a key factor in the investment decision. In an interview, Marcus noted that her industry expertise enabled her to develop both the product and cultivate relationships with companies that could distribute it to customers. He was particularly impressed by Numeracle's achievements relative to its funding history, characterizing Johnson as "someone who was frankly doing more with less."

Customer testimonials strengthened the investment thesis. Marcus referenced a contact center operator who reported that Numeracle increased answered calls from 19,000 to 22,000 out of 40,000 monthly calls. For businesses seeking to reach prospective customers, this improvement in connection rates could translate to increased sales opportunities.

Marcus believes Johnson's telecommunications background provides Numeracle with a competitive edge over newer entrants. Beyond understanding how industry components interconnect, Johnson has leveraged those relationships to introduce Numeracle to major corporations. "She's sales. She's engineering, and she's just a very, very good leader," Marcus said.

Looking forward, the investor anticipates demand across healthcare, retail, home services and financial sectors, particularly as AI makes impersonation more prevalent. "This is a communications problem, not one for one industry," he stated.