On April 30, Jonathan Anguelov, founder and ex-CEO of Aircall, the business telephony unicorn turned centaur, was a guest at the luncheons of the Chinese Business Club, France’s leading business club founded and directed by Harold Parisot. An interview between two leading figures in French entrepreneurship.
Since 2012, Harold Parisot, founder and president of the Chinese Business Club, has organized around 15 lunches a year for 130 member companies. A club which, as its name suggests, is now focused on the French ecosystem. Every month, France’s leading business club invites several types of guest of honor to lunches, including political figures (Emmanuel Macron, Nicolas Sarkozy, Albert of Monaco…), major CAC 40 bosses (Total, L’Oréal, Accor, Club Med, Pernod Ricard) as well as successful French Tech entrepreneurs such as Blablacar, Qonto, Backmarket, Doctolib and now Aircall.
Founded in 2014, Aircall is an enterprise telephony company that became a unicorn seven years later, after a valuation of over a billion euros. As a result, it passed the 100 million sales milestone in 2022, making it one of the first centaurs of French Tech. Invited to a Chinese Business Club luncheon, Aircall’s founder and former CEO, Jonathan Anguelov, wanted to build an internationalized company while remaining French at heart. Today, 85% of the company’s sales are generated outside France, particularly across the Atlantic.
LUXUS PLUS: Harold Parisot, you are behind this new luncheon organized by the Chinese Business Club at the Hôtel Intercontinental Paris Le Grand. Why did you choose Jonathan Angelov as guest of honor?
Harold Parisot: The Chinese Business Club network should be seen as a gas pedal of business opportunities. Your address book is extremely important for developing your business exponentially. My aim is to invite entrepreneurs with magnificent success stories as guests of honor. For me, Jonathan Angelov is the perfect example, in the sense that he’s “a former DDASS kid who managed to set up a unicorn, a start-up valued at over a billion euros. The wow effect is guaranteed. And club members and participants alike want to meet and chat with the guest of honor. As you know, the club is quite eclectic: there are senators, members of parliament, ambassadors, professional athletes and even comedians. And no one can remain indifferent to such wonderful achievements. I’m their greatest admirer.
L+: Jonathan Anguelov, could you tell us a little about Aircall? I understand that you’re not just in the cloud, but also in artificial intelligence, a technology in which you were among the pioneers…
Jonathan Anguelov: Our major innovation at Aircall was initially to enable corporate telephony to communicate with its information system (CRM and other customer service software). Ten years ago, such integration simply didn’t exist, to the extent that customer service was often unable to find out the telephone number of incoming calls. Right from the start, we wanted to simplify the whole process and create a telephony system where the only question was no longer what’s your number, but what’s your problem? Starting from this base enabled us to create more trust, while allowing our teams to concentrate solely on personalizing their sales pitch. As a result, Aircall has made business calls faster and more productive, while improving the overall customer experience. Because we wanted first and foremost to simplify the daily lives of sales teams and call centers, we bet on artificial intelligence from 2019 to enable the transcription and summarization of phone calls. Today, Aircall is always looking to simplify its customers’ lives, to make them more productive and better day after day, and analytical tools clearly enable teams to make progress along this path.
L+: What analytics can Aircall and its AI bring out of phone conversations?
JA: Some features have been done live and others through integrations, i.e. via other companies that integrate with us, such as Attention.tech. The idea behind this is to be able, at the end of the call, to answer questions such as “Was the person attentive? Did they ask the right questions? Did I personally answer them well? What was the tone of voice? It takes very high sound quality to accurately transcribe an emotion in the tone of voice, what the Americans call “sentiment analysis”.
L+: How did you manage this sudden hyper-growth?
JA: When Aircall was launched, the need was clearly identified and particularly pressing: our customers understood it, had been dreaming of it for years, but above all, they supported us in developing our proposal. It was this need that motivated us to take the time necessary to deliver a first-class product. Given our success, we went from zero to one million euros in sales in less than 18 months. The following year, we were at 3, then 9 million, then 18, then 30, then 50, then 80, then 120. Now we’re at over 150 million euros to date, and we plan to end the year at around 200 million euros.
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Featured Photo : © Chinese Business Club/Aircall
