Enabling Small Businesses Succeed: Our Investment in PressOne

Founders: Mayowa Okegbenle and Opeyemi Shokunbi

Company Name: PressOne

Website: www.pressone.africa

Voice calls remain a popular means of communication between people but they can be fraught with severe connectivity issues, poor call quality, and most importantly can be quite expensive. Growing internet penetration rates, falling costs of data, and 4G adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa enables an increasingly standard way to make voice calls - Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). VoIP is essentially internet calling; the caller's voice is recorded, converted into binary code, sent over an internet connection to the receiver’s address. On the receiver’s end, ones and zeroes are received, in real-time, decoded back into an audible sound, and played back. VoIP calls can be much cheaper than regular voice calls because they rely on an internet connection and they work well in areas with poor cellular coverage.

PressOne offers smarter phone numbers that help business owners do more with less. It offers entrepreneurs VoIP-based phone numbers that allow them to receive calls over the internet, monitor and store call history over extended periods, implement operating hours outside which callers receive pre-recorded voice prompts, record calls; all without a SIM card.

Quite simply, companies that offer great customer service are not only more successful than those that don't, they're also happier and more productive. And yet, there's still a lot of skepticism about voice as a way to interact with customers: "It's just too much work," "It won't scale."

When we first met Mayowa Okegbenle and Ope Shokunbi, Pressone’s co-founders, we were immediately struck by their technical expertise and their singular mission to enable businesses to listen to their customers. Mayowa had previously built Precurio with Shola Akinlade, and Ope was Head of IT at Nestlé Nigeria.

With PressOne VoIP-based phone numbers, small businesses can receive calls over the internet anywhere they are in the world, monitor and store call history over extended periods, implement operating hours outside which callers receive pre-recorded voice prompts, and record calls; multiple users can share a single line with multiple people enabling collaborative work processes and monitoring which is especially useful as businesses embrace hybrid work environments, all without a SIM card.

We believe that the most compelling technology solutions on the continent will empower small and medium businesses with tools and services that enable them to reduce churn, increase their user base, and ultimately help create distinct value for their customers.

PressOne is building a new communication infrastructure that enables customers and businesses to leverage the most sophisticated tool we have for communicating ideas and emotion—voice. In our conversations with one of their existing users, the business owner specifically lauded the crystal-clear quality as far ahead of any other solution they had tried.

When compared to existing traditional call solutions, PressOne provides businesses with a more reliable, robust and superior solution. With phone numbers that can be used for more than just receiving calls, these businesses can now review their stored calls and respond to their customers’ needs faster. PressOne helps these small businesses communicate with their callers as the big companies do, all at an affordable price. On the other end of the spectrum, digital solutions like WhatsApp are tailored towards messaging and lack an extensive suite of features to manage significant volumes of critical customer conversations.

In time, Pressone will enable tomorrow's most successful and beloved brands and businesses to unlock deeper, more personal relationships with their customers. We’re at a tipping point in the evolution of customer service and businesses that will thrive within this new paradigm will be those who can listen deeply and attentively. They will use PressOne.

We are excited to be backing Mayowa and Ope as they enable millions of businesses in Africa to stay more connected to their customers.