Today, we are announcing that YouMail has acquired Thumbtel, a maker of really cool communication apps. These include the Hullomail visual voicemail app and the innovative Another Number phone number service for small business teams.
Thumbtel is actually based in the United Kingdom, and has been around since 2008! Building a company that lasts for over 10 years and has survived multiple economic booms and busts is a great accomplishment, and a credit to the Thumbtel team.
So why did we do this acquisition?
First, YouMail has focused to this point solely on the US and to a lesser degree Canada. However, we’re hearing directly from more and more consumers in other countries asking for our services. Thumbtel provides us a platform for quickly providing call protection in the United Kingdom, where robocalls are a consistent problem. This is despite the Telephone Preference Service that allows people to opt-out of receiving unsolicited sales or marketing calls. The most recent OFCOM Nuisance Calls Tracker shows that between roughly 50% to 60% of people in the United Kingdom had gotten a nuisance robocall in the past four weeks on their mobile phones.
Second, we’re always looking to increase the footprint and scale of YouMail’s premium consumer subscription business. More scale allows us to invest more in improving the service for everyone. This acquisition does that, meaningfully increasing the size of our paying user base. It also gives us an opportunity to use our existing team and resources to help scale up the adoption of HulloMail and AnotherNumber apps, especially in the United Kingdom.
And finally, this expands and improves our product and engineering teams. In fact, with this acquisition, YouMail’s team will have team members located in the US, Canada, Jamaica, the UK, Malaysia, and Thailand – so we truly have a team that’s working from anywhere.
Our acquisition of ThumbTel follows our late summer acquisition of PhoneTag. We expect to continue to explore similar acquisitions where our platform can support and run communication services more efficiently and provide users with a better, more secure communication experience.
But for now, a hearty welcome to the Thumbtel team, and to all the users of HulloMail and Another Number.
