PressOne Africa was founded in 2021 by long-time friends Opeyemi Shokunbi and Mayowa Okegbenle. The platform enables businesses of any size to set up a phone system for their sales or customer support team in as little as ten minutes.
PressOne has liberated African firms from the consequences of permitting workers to utilise their lines for work-related communications.
When you subscribe to PressOne, you get a phone number for your business or team and access to their web solution. Here, you can see all calls made across your team, set up what you want potential customers to hear when they call your business, and add notes to any conversation.
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The Journey of Founding PressOne
PressOne was formed by Okegbenle for personal reasons. He needed a professional welcome, an official business line, and a phone number that anyone could call for information about the business to register a business entity.
However, he was disappointed to find that traditional network solution suppliers only offered to send him a bid. He was in need of a professional greeting and immediate setup, not just a pitch.
PressOne does just that and rolled out in 2022 with just an Android app. Since then, over 3,000 businesses have subscribed, and the solution is also available on Web, iOS, and Chrome, as well as popular customer engagement solutions like Zoho, Hubspot, and Freshdesk.
According to Okegbenle, they are pretty much in a market where existing alternatives don’t have the same focus they have on making proper business phone solutions accessible and affordable to businesses of any size.
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PressOne expands global phone services and developer tools
PressOne is backed by Ventures Platform, Techstarts, Voltron Capital, Impact Hub, and a number of angels, and has raised over US$1 million to date. It has ambitious expansion plans.
“Today, we sell exclusively in Nigeria, and we allow any Nigerian business to purchase phone numbers from Nigeria, Kenya, and United States,” said Okegbenle. “However, that is changing soon. First, we are going to allow Nigerians to purchase phone numbers from 25 more countries, and secondly, we are going to open up the service in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa.”
Product-wise, PressOne has also expanded its use case, including services like Voice OTP, Bulk Voice Campaigns, and embeddable voice.
“With embeddable voice, developers and product owners can embed phone calls in their apps. Imagine the call feature you find in logistics and e-commerce apps? We can power that easily, and locally,” said Okegbenle.
PressOne primarily makes money through subscriptions, and also earns usage-based revenue on services like Voice OTP and Bulk Voice Campaigns.