The Fonality Story

Fonality was founded in 2003 as a residential VoIP provider by serial entrepreneur and SMB expert, Chris Lyman. Within months, Lyman and his small team needed to purchase a PBX phone system for their new office. After shopping around and receiving a $15,000 bid for a phone system for 5 employees, Lyman realized they were in the wrong business. Fonality immediately shifted gears from residential VoIP to business telephony, and built version 1.0 of Fonality PBXtra.

Lyman's vision was to change the phone market by creating the world's first truly affordable enterprise-class phone system for business of all sizes. Also wanting to leverage his expertise in making technology accessible for everyone, he designed Fonality PBXtra to be "as easy to use as Hotmail." With Fonality’s system, business owners and managers could manage and administer their own phone systems and eliminate the expense of having to call the "phone guy" every time they needed to make a change to their phone systems.

Fonality stormed into the IP-PBX market fueled by an investment from a small group of angel investors. In 2006, the company received its first round of venture capital from Azure Capital, which was used to expand its management team and continue product development.

Fonality has demonstrated significant business success – growing at an average monthly rate of 10 percent, achieving profitability in 2006, and increasing call volumes at a rate of 400 percent per year for the past three years. As a result of these successes, in early 2007, Fonality secured additional funding from Intel Capital. In early 2008, Fonality announced a partnership with Dell, Inc., where Dell will sell Fonality VoIP Phone Systems to their small and medium business customers.

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