At Whitepages, Alex Algard Bought Out His VCs. Now At Hiya He’s Raised $18M To Fight Phone Spam

At his previous company, Whitepages, Alex Algard bought out his venture-capital investors to end a difficult relationship and regain control. Now, at a spin-off company called Hiya, Algard is bringing in funding again, this time $18 million in a Series A round led by Europe’s Balderton Capital at an undisclosed valuation. The funds will help Hiya, which uses technology to help mobile phone users fight spam and robocalls and works in partnership with wireless carriers and handset makers, expand globally. With the investment, Balderton’s Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, an early executive at Uber and Dropbox who Algard met through a mutual friend, will join Hiya’s board.

Algard is aware of the irony. “I certainly thought a little bit about it, but the circumstances are different enough that I didn’t feel like it was a massive change in perspective,” Algard, 43, told FORBES in a telephone interview from Valencia, Spain, where he was attending a conference. “I am getting a guy who is an unusual investor. He’s really been there in the trenches. This is not just capital and a bunch of downside.”

As we wrote about last year (FORBES, August 23, 2016), Algard bought the whitepages.com domain name more than 20 years ago for $900, and then worked to transform what began as a side hustle into a real business with $70 million in revenue in 2015. That transition required guts and a steadfast belief in the business after his biggest clients pulled out, revenue plunged – and he pulled together some $80 million to buy out his unhappy investors. By last year, Seattle-based Whitepages was back on track, and at its 20th anniversary Algard turned over the CEO slot to Rob Eleveld, previously head of its fast-growing Whitepages Pro division, to focus on Hiya, which spun out of Whitepages as a separate entity. As for Whitepages, it expects a run rate of $100 million in 2018.

That history makes Algard’s decision to bring in venture-capital funding at Hiya all the more surprising. However Algard – who relocated to London from Seattle last year – said that the company wanted the funding in order to scale the fast-growing business quickly and to create more separation from Whitepages. The funds will be used to expand globally and to increase Hiya’s artificial-intelligence and machine-learning capabilities. “A lot of American companies are not that great at expanding internationally, whereas in some other countries like Sweden, where I grew up, you have to think internationally from day one,” Algard said. “If Hiya is going to become a global service, we have to think internationally.”

Hiya analyzes more than 3.5 billion calls and texts each month to provide contextual information about who is on the other end of the phone – and help users grab the calls they want and avoid the spam and robocalls they don’t. The company has partnerships with AT&T, T-Mobile, Samsung and others that allow it to serve more than 20 million users in 196 countries. Algard declined to disclose the company’s revenue.

To see full news please use the following link.