SoundBite Communications has filed to come public via an IPO, and for filing purposes it lists up to $69 million in common stock to be sold. Its proposed ticker is "SDBT" on NASDAQ. The IPO underwriting group is rather large: Cowen & Co. and Thomas Weisel Partners are listed as the lead underwriters; and co-managers are listed as Needham & Co, Cantor Fitsgerald & Co., and America’s Growth Capital.
SoundBite Communications provides on-demand automated voice messaging ("AVM") solutions. Using a web browser, organizations can employ AVM to initiate and manage customer contact campaigns for a variety of collections, customer care and marketing processes. This AVM service is designed to help organizations increase revenue, enhance customer service and retention, and secure payments by improving their customer contact processes. Their AVM service is supposedly designed to improve a contact center’s efficiency by increasing the productivity of contact center agents and facilitating the use of “agentless” transactions. In short, they can keep bugging you at no effort on their own. The company claims that it placed nearly 1 Billion calls in 2006 from more than 200 organizations.
SoundBite’s client base includes what it lists as 14 of the 20 largest collection agencies in North America based on 2006 revenue; Revenues totaled $7.8 million in 2004, $16.4 million in 2005 and $29.1 million in 2006. Without investing directly into the debt collectors themselves, this company is a service provider to the debt collectors and a way of profiting off their service providers.
The company is venture backed by North Bridge Venture Partners, Mosaic Venture Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and Venture Capital Fund of New England IV. So, it doesn’t look like there is any way to use a backdoor play into this IPO. More information can be found at the full filing at the SEC.
Jon C. Ogg
April 17, 2007
Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.
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