Numeracle Raises $28M to Stop Carriers From Labeling Business Calls as Spam

Numeracle has raised $28 million from Edison Partners to fix a costly glitch in modern telephony: legitimate business calls wrongly labeled as spam or blocked outright by carriers.

The company, based in McLean, Virginia, disclosed the round exclusively to Crunchbase News. The deal brings Numeracle's total funding to $34.8 million since its founding in 2018, including a $6.8 million Series A raised in December 2023, founder and CEO Rebekah Johnson said. Edison was the sole investor in the new round. Numeracle declined to disclose its valuation.

The numbers behind the business are small but telling. Numeracle says it has roughly 4,000 business customers and about 85 employees. It became profitable this year — sooner than Johnson had expected.

What does Numeracle actually do?

The mechanism is straightforward. Numeracle verifies that a business is real and does what it claims. Once a business passes those checks, the company links it to the phone numbers it uses and shares that information with the systems carriers rely on to flag or block calls.

That matters because two problems now hit businesses at once. Fraudsters increasingly impersonate them, while call-screening systems stop their genuine calls from reaching customers. A patient might ignore a hospital calling about an upcoming procedure. A bank customer might decline a legitimate call because the phone displays a fraud warning.

Numeracle makes money two ways. Customers pay an annual subscription to monitor and remove incorrect spam labels. They can also pay a per-call fee to display their business name, logo and reason for calling on a recipient's phone.

Other companies can pay Numeracle to run its verification checks on businesses they are considering taking on as customers — a second revenue line built on the same infrastructure.

How did a regulatory warning become a company?

Johnson, an engineer who previously worked in regulatory compliance at telecom provider West, spotted the problem in 2016 while participating in the Federal Communications Commission's Robocall Strike Force. She warned carriers that their efforts to screen unwanted calls would also hit legitimate businesses, because the screening systems had no information about who was calling.

About three months later, she said, a carrier's federal regulatory counsel called her while she stood in her parents' kitchen.

"Everything you said was going to happen is happening. What do we do?" she recalled him asking.

That conversation prompted her to start Numeracle. The founding was austere. Johnson was a newly single mother who had lost her job and used her life savings to start the business. Living on a farm in Grand Bay, Alabama, without internet access, she worked from cafes.

"When you need to feed your children and provide a roof over their head, you're going to count every penny," Johnson said.

That frugality stuck. Numeracle operated for several years before raising its Series A. Johnson said about 90% of the company's sales inquiries come through unpaid inbound channels. With the new funding, she plans to spend more on marketing to specific industries, starting with healthcare.

The customer base also spans financial services, home services, higher education, government organizations and charities. Johnson declined to identify individual customers.

Why does AI make verification harder?

Johnson said Numeracle built its own verification tools because existing services weren't thorough enough. The stakes are high: if Numeracle approves a fraudster, that fraudster's calls become less likely to be flagged as spam — so fakes have every incentive to slip through.

AI has raised the bar. Johnson said Numeracle has encountered fake companies with state registrations, employer identification numbers and supposed employees with active LinkedIn profiles.

"The scary part for me isn't necessarily the AI voices," Johnson said. "It's actually AI-built businesses."

Numeracle uses AI itself to help identify those fabrications, though Johnson declined to describe the methods in detail.

The new capital will fund hiring and international expansion. Numeracle currently operates only in the United States, but Johnson said interest from Europe has pushed the expansion forward, with some funding allocated to that effort. The company also plans to adapt its verification tools beyond phone calls, targeting messaging, chat apps, marketplaces and AI agents.

What convinced the investor?

For Lenard Marcus, a general partner at Edison Partners, Johnson's telecom and engineering background was a major reason to invest. He said her industry knowledge helped her build both the product and the relationships needed to bring it to customers.

He was also drawn to efficiency, describing Johnson as "someone who was frankly doing more with less." Customer interviews backed the case. Marcus recalled one contact center operator who said Numeracle increased answered calls from 19,000 to 22,000 out of 40,000 calls a month. For businesses chasing prospects, more answered calls translate into more sales.

Marcus also argued that Johnson's years in telecom give Numeracle an edge over newer competitors, because she understands how the industry's parts fit together and has used those relationships to get in front of large companies.

"She's sales. She's engineering, and she's just a very, very good leader," Marcus said.

Looking ahead, Marcus sees demand across healthcare, retail, home services and finance, with AI making impersonation more prevalent.

"This is a communications problem, not one for one industry," he said.

What comes next?

The open question is whether businesses will pay for Numeracle's verification across other forms of communication — messaging, chat apps, marketplaces and AI agents. For now, the company's revenue rests on a narrower, immediate problem: making sure a legitimate phone call gets answered.