Team Hiya hit the ground running in 2021. As we close out the first quarter, let’s take a look at what we’ve accomplished in the past three months.
Hiya named top employer by Forbes and Built In Seattle
Hiya’s continued success is a reflection of the talented, hard-working team that’s committed to serving our customers and improving the voice experience for all. And others are taking note. Forbes recognized Hiya as the #1 Best Startup Employer in America, beating out 2,500 companies analyzed by Forbes and Statista. Hiya was also ranked as one of the Best Places to Work by Built In Seattle for the third straight year. (We’re also hiring for roles across the organization! Check out our open positions.)
4th annual State of the Call Report launches
In February, we launched our 4th annual State of the Call Report, making our data and insights available to everyone. Hiya founder and CEO Alex Algard explained the findings to hundreds of people on our webinar, which you can watch here. And USA Today dug into the data to show why Americans have stopped answering the phone.
New partners and programs kick off
We kicked off the year by deploying Hiya Protect with our newest partner, Telenor Norway, who became the first major European carrier to partner with an intelligent call protection service. And just in time: Telenor Norway subscribers were protected from a massive Wangiri attack at the end of January.
Next up: Nokia announced it successfully tested Europe’s first cloud-based VoLTE network integration for call protection with Hiya. This test was a great step for the industry, as noted by Jitin Bhandari, vice president of core network products at Nokia: “Proving that open solutions like this can be effectively integrated and accurately detect spam calls is a big step in pushing the industry forward. This is the type of open cloud-based innovation and collaboration that is needed to solve nuisance/spam calls in networks and make the communication experience better for users across the globe.”
We also made Hiya Connect available for free to organizations in the UK to support the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and contact tracing efforts. If you know of an organization that could use this service, reach out to us here. Speaking of Hiya Connect, we had our best quarter to date and surpassed our Q1 goal.
And to round out the quarter, AT&T announced AT&T ActiveArmor, their newest effort to keep customers protected from digital threats, including spam and fraud calls. Hiya has powered AT&T’s call protection service since 2016, which blocked or labeled 17 million spam calls per day in 2020.
Team Hiya continues to grow with new employees
In the first quarter, we added 13 new employees across all functions, including sales, marketing and engineering. That’s nearly 10% of the entire Hiya team that joined us in the past three months! The newcomers include Anthony Mendonca, our first VP of Engineering who will lead engineering, QA, IT, and tech operations. Kush Parikh was also promoted from COO to president to continue to lead the team through this period of rapid growth. Kush caught up with GeekWire to reflect on his time with Hiya: “If my first 18 months are any indicator of our future, our opportunities to transform the voice call are virtually limitless. Hiya is a true hidden gem here in Seattle, and I look forward to leading the company in this new capacity.”
Hiya finds new ways to share insights with the public
When you process more than 150 billion calls annually, you get some great insights. And we’re constantly looking for new ways to share these insights with our customers. In addition to the State of the Call report, we also launched a new resource center on our website and made several guides available, including How to Stop Spoofing, Beyond Caller ID, and 15 Key Call Center Metrics to Measure Outbound Call Performance.
Our own resources aside, we also shared our insights with the media to further inform consumers and ensure they stay protected from spam and fraud calls. Kush chatted with CNN on What’s it like to live in the robocall capital of America, explaining that, "Scammers are measuring success metrics just like any good business. The South tends to get hit more because the scammers have more success there.” We also worked with the BBC to ensure people stay protected from the growing spam problem in the UK.
There’s so much more that Team Hiya has accomplished so far in 2021 and we can’t wait to kick off Q2 and continue to deliver for our customers and partners.
