Octopus Investments (“Octopus”) today confirms that it has invested in IOVOX, the provider of telephony analytics. Octopus’ investment will support IOVOX’s plans for further expansion into Europe.The IOVOX platform gives real-time visibility into all aspects of telephone traffic, enabling customers to track, analyse and optimise lead generation from telephone campaigns. The IOVOX product gives customers the ability to analyse the effectiveness of marketing spend and track return on investment (ROI) for offline campaigns. This is especially helpful for businesses operating in the current economic environment when budgets are under pressure and marketing spend has been tightened.
IOVOX will use Octopus’ funding to grow its product development capability, strengthen its sales team and to roll out its own virtual telephone exchanges. By increasing its staff base and further developing its own technology IOVOX will be able to manage its costs effectively as it looks to expand into the European market.
The ventures team at Octopus has an outstanding record of supporting high growth companies, such as IOVOX, with past investments including Zoopla,Graze.com, SwiftKey and Secret Escapes.
Octopus’ investment in IOVOX has been made on behalf of its investors in the Octopus Titan Venture Capital Trust funds, Octopus Eureka and the Octopus Venture Partners, a network of business leaders, entrepreneurs and private investors that works in conjunction with the ventures team.
Commenting on Octopus’ support, Ryan Gallagher, CEO and founder of IOVOX, said: “Despite the prevalence of sophisticated online analytical tools, when a business receives an inbound phone call it is difficult for it to understand what has led to that person making the call. IOVOX addresses this problem. We enable companies to measure the effectiveness of offline marketing campaigns in a very novel way and we are really excited about working with Octopus to expand our services into new geographies.”
Alliott Cole, a principal on the ventures team at Octopus Investments, adds: “We seek exceptional individuals to back and IOVOX has a young and dynamic management team led by a strong and driven CEO. We look forward to working with the management team as it continues to builds on its success in the UK and expand the business into other markets.”
IOVOX has achieved significant growth over the last few years. It is already working with a number of large companies, including BT and livebookings.com, to help them deliver ‘intelligent telephony’ and to enable them to better track the ROI for converting different types of advertising to telephone sales.