Grace Ashiru
PressOne Africa, a firm that creates business phone systems for entrepreneurs, has raised $600,000 in a pre-seed round led by Ventures Platform, with participation from Voltron Capital and a slew of excellent angel investors.
Mayowa Okegbenle and Opeyemi Shokunbi started PressOne. It lets business owners listen in on all customer phone calls made by staff or team members from anywhere, at any time, on their computer or mobile device.
Entrepreneurs can keep track of conversations, look at notes, and contact customers again. So, they can keep the quality of their service high and get and keep more customers.
Mayowa Okegbenle and Shola Akinlade started Klein Devort together before they started PressOne Africa (Paystack CEO). Their best-known product, Precurio, was a tool for internal business collaboration used by thousands of businesses worldwide.
It came out in 2008 and was sold in 7 different languages. Before leaving Nestle to start PressOne with Mayowa, Opeyemi worked there for over a decade. He built and maintained IT infrastructure worth millions of dollars and was the Technology Operations Lead.
In developed markets, cloud-based phone systems are prevalent. Aircall raised $120 million in June 2021 for its Series D round. It’s easy to see why this solution makes sense, but the question has always been whether it could work in developing markets like Nigeria. The answer is yes, based on how well WhatsApp calls work in the country.
Since bandwidth quality has improved in the last few years, this may be the perfect time for PressOne.
Mayowa Okegbenle says, “Today, the average entrepreneur uses their SIM-based phone number for business, which is fine if you are the only one in the industry.
But they buy the same SIM-based phone numbers for their employees so that they can talk to customers.
The problem with this is that they will no longer be able to see how that employee interacts with customers after that point, which means losing sight of a key revenue generator.
With a PressOne phone system, they can buy business phone numbers for their employees and stay in charge of how their customers talk to them.
The best thing about this is that before now, only big companies could use this kind of solution. Now, we’ve made this just for entrepreneurs. You don’t have to set up anything; it costs as little as $ 1,499 per month.
There have been a lot of new ideas in messaging, but phone calls are still the best way to build relationships with new customers and close deals.With PressOne, entrepreneurs can now see all of these calls in real-time to keep track of their sales and customer service activities.
Practically speaking, this will be helpful to B2C business owners whose companies frequently get client calls. They will now be able to take remedial action to increase sales and stop customer churn since they will better understand what happens between the customers and their people or staff.
We’re happy to help Mayowa and Opeyemi. We think that the best technology solutions on the continent will give small and medium-sized businesses tools and services that will help them keep customers and get more people to use their services.
When we first met PressOne’s co-founders, Mayowa Okegbenle and Ope Shokunbi, we were impressed by their technical skills and mission to help businesses listen to their customers. Kola Aina,Partner at the beginning of Ventures Platform.
PressOne’s beta version came out in June 2022, and hundreds of entrepreneurs took part in it to help make it better. You can start by going to www.pressone.africa. Subscriptions start at 1,499 per month.
