Aircall, which offers a cloud-based call center and CRM service, raises $120M led by Goldman Sachs Group's asset management arm at a $1B+ valuation
Context & Ripple Effects
Aircall's new $120M round, led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management at a $1B+ valuation, roughly triples the company's lifetime funding just thirteen months after its $65M Series C led by DTCP pushed its total past $100M — crossing the unicorn line puts it on the same funding ladder as its direct competitors.
Goldman is not new to the category: the bank's asset management arm already backed call-analytics firm CallMiner with a $75M round in late 2019, so this deal stacks a second contact-center bet alongside rivals like Asapp, which doubled its valuation to $1.6B in one year with its own $120M Series C a month earlier, and Talkdesk, sitting at $3B+ after its 2020 raise.
First-order effects
- Aircall enters the unicorn club with Goldman Sachs Asset Management as lead backer, gaining the balance sheet to compete against far larger rivals — Asapp at $1.6B and Talkdesk above $3B — in cloud call center and CRM software.
Second-order effects
- Talkdesk and Asapp face a newly capitalized peer whose Goldman ties echo the bank's existing CallMiner position, raising the odds that consolidation in the category runs through a single financial sponsor holding multiple cards.
Third-order effects
- If growth-stage asset managers like Goldman keep leading contact-center rounds rather than traditional venture funds, category valuations will increasingly be set by institutional capital chasing recurring SaaS revenue rather than product differentiation alone.
The trend: Cloud call-center software is drawing progressively larger rounds at steeply climbing valuations, with financial sponsors like Goldman Sachs displacing conventional VCs at the top of the funding stack.