OpenPhone, which provides SMBs with a business phone line through its mobile app, raises a $40M Series B led by Tiger Global, bringing its total funding to $56M
Context & Ripple Effects
OpenPhone's raise is a step-change from its $14M Series A led by Craft Ventures in 2020: the company now has $56M total to push its app-based business phone line deeper into the SMB market, with the round led by Tiger Global, which led Mesh Payments' $50M Series B just months earlier — a repeat pattern of the fund backing SMB-facing software at Series B.
The raise lands in a market where SMBs are proving both a growth engine and a risk pool: related coverage notes one in three SMBs was breached last year, and players like BlueVoyant have raised large SMB-focused rounds, while Everphone's mobile-as-a-service model shows capital is flowing at multiple layers of the business-mobility stack.
First-order effects
- OpenPhone gains $40M to scale its shared-number team phone product beyond the iOS/Android apps it built after the Series A, with Tiger Global's backing signaling institutional conviction in the SMB communications category.
- Tiger Global extends its 2022 streak of leading SMB software Series Bs, adding OpenPhone to a portfolio that already includes Mesh Payments' expense-tracking round.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent business-phone and mobility vendors face a competitor whose distribution is an app download rather than carrier contracts or device fleets — pressuring the Everphone-style device-rental layer to justify itself against software-only lines.
- SMB software vendors across adjacent categories (security, expenses, communications) now compete for the same Tiger-led capital cycle, raising the funding bar for any startup selling to small businesses.
Third-order effects
- If Tiger Global's rapid-fire Series B cadence holds — the fund's COVID-era pace has already been linked to a wave of fast-created unicorns — SMB tooling could consolidate around a handful of heavily capitalized app-based platforms, squeezing out underfunded point solutions.
- As SMBs standardize on app-delivered business infrastructure, the security exposure highlighted by last year's breach rate becomes a structural requirement: communications platforms like OpenPhone inherit the compliance and protection burden that carriers once carried.
The trend: SMB business infrastructure — phone lines, expenses, security — is shifting from carrier- and hardware-bound services to venture-funded app platforms, with Tiger Global's Series B pace setting the market's tempo.