RingCentral

RingCentral, Inc. is an American provider of cloud-based communication and collaboration products and services.

CEO Vlad Shmunis and CTO Vlad Vendrow founded the company in 1999. Investors included Doug Leone, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and DAG Ventures. It completed its IPO in 2013.

History
RingCentral founders Shmunis and Vendrow previously worked together at RingZero Systems, where Shmunis was founder/CEO and Vendrow was director of engineering. RingZero was focused on small business communications on Microsoft Windows. The company was sold to Motorola in 2003, and Shmunis and Vendrow founded RingCentral.

RingCentral received its first round of venture capital investment in 2006. In 2011, it added Cisco and Silicon Valley Bank as investors and had, to date, secured $45 million in capital investment. It completed its IPO on September 27, 2013, and completed a follow-on offering in March 2014 that raised $39.8 million.

In February 2020, RingCentral and Avaya unveiled the Avaya Cloud Office application.

In April 2020, RingCentral launched RingCentral Video, a video-conferencing product, which completed its differentiated Message Video Phone (MVP) solution. The RingCentral MVP app launched in May 2020.

In 2021, RingCentral entered an exclusive UCaaS partnership with Mitel; under this collaboration, Mitel’s users can access RingCentral’s cloud communications platform.

Mo Katibeh was appointed as President and COO in January 2022, having previously served as an AT&T executive for over 20 years.

RingCentral began offering its MVP and Contact Center features to Amazon Web Services in February 2023.

RingSense, an AI platform, was launched in March 2023.

In April 2023, Vodafone Italy and RingCentral partnered to roll out Vodafone Business UC. In May 2023, Vodafone Portugal and RingCentral announced the Vodafone One Net TeamCollaboration. Using RingCentral’s UCaaS solution, these partnerships combine RingCentral’s messaging and video capabilities with Vodafone’s fixed and mobile voice communications functionality into one platform.

The next generation of RingCentral for Microsoft Teams 2.0 was announced in May 2023. The next-gen embedded app integrates RingCentral’s cloud PBX & softphone dialer capabilities directly into the Teams platform and features calling, SMS, and fax. It can also be coupled with RingCentral Contact Center.

In June 2023, RingCentral became the first global cloud provider to offer fully compliant cloud phone system services in India.

On August 28, 2023, Tarek Robbiati became CEO.

Acquisitions
In June 2015, RingCentral acquired Glip, a persistent workstream collaboration platform that adds team messaging, document sharing, task and event management, and other collaboration functionality to the RingCentral platform. In October 2018, it acquired Dimelo, a Paris-based OmniChannel contact center provider.

In January 2019, it acquired Connect First, a Boulder, Colorado-based outbound and blended customer engagement provider.

In December 2020, it purchased DeepAffects, which specializes in intelligence-assisted speech recognition. In March 2021, it purchased Kindite, an encryption service provider.

RingCentral acquired Hopin, a provider of online audience engagement technology, in August 2023.

Products
RingCentral’s integrated platform allows for compatibility throughout its product lines. For example, MVP (UC) can be used in tandem with RingCentral’s Contact Center (CaaS). It provides a cloud-based business phone system with PBX features such as multiple extensions, call control; Outlook, Salesforce, Google Docs, DropBox and Box integration; SMS; video conferencing and web conferencing; fax; auto-receptionist; call logs; and rule-based call routing and answering. Unlike most cloud-based technologies, business customers are not required to invest capital or purchase maintenance contracts.

RingCentral Office
RingCentral Office is a cloud-based PBX system for businesses. RingCentral Office features include call auto-attendant, company directory, call forwarding and handling, multiple extensions, a mobile app for iPhone and Android, Business SMS, video conferencing and screen-sharing, and fax.

RingCentral Glip
In June 2015, RingCentral acquired Glip, a persistent workstream collaboration platform that adds team messaging, document sharing, task and event management, and other collaboration functionality to the RingCentral platform.

Offices
RingCentral has a total of 22 office locations globally. RingCentral's headquarters are in Belmont, California, with other US offices in Denver, Charlotte, and Dallas. It has international offices in Canada, the UK, France, Bulgaria, Spain, China, India, the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, South Korea, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, and the Philippines.

Reception
For the past eight years, Gartner has recognized RingCentral as a Worldwide Leader in the Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, most recently in 2022.

In 2022, RingCentral was featured as one of San Francisco’s 100 Best Places to Work. In 2023, RingCentral was included in Fast Company’s annual 100 Best Workplaces for Innovators list.