Portfolio news
Portfolio news
Apifonica rebuilds its voice platform around AI agents and prepares a first on-premise delivery
Software investors tend to treat on-premise work as a drag on margins. In this market we think it is the right bet: an operator or a bank that may not send call audio across a border will not buy a cloud product at any price, and most voice AI vendors would rather not install inside someone else's server room.
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Apifonica signs a memorandum with Uztelecom on a voice AI centre in Uzbekistan
We would not count a memorandum as a customer. The second stage would matter more than the first. If a national operator ends up reselling the agent to its own business subscribers, Apifonica gets a sales channel in Uzbekistan it could not have built by itself.
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Apifonica voice agent answers patient calls at ALAB Laboratoria in Poland
We read the 28 per cent as the result and the 80 as context. A consultant handed a pre-filled screen still takes the call, and only the calls the agent finishes alone change what a contact centre costs to run.
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Apifonica says it has cleared an ISO 27001 audit and an independent penetration test
Certification is not a growth story, it is an access story. Banks, insurers and public bodies in Europe cannot buy from a supplier that fails these checks, so passing them is what converts a pipeline of regulated prospects into a pipeline that can actually close.
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TENIOS voice agent handles 8,500 calls at Haus des Meeres in Vienna
The deployment came through an Austrian carrier partner rather than a direct sale, which is the distribution model the group has said it is moving towards. One reference of this kind is worth more as proof the channel works than as revenue.
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Sascha Korten becomes managing director of TENIOS
Four years after the acquisition, the German subsidiary gets a managing director hired from outside rather than promoted from within. That is usually the point at which an acquired business stops being integrated and starts being asked to grow.
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TENIOS voice agent takes first-line calls on Randstad Professional's IT service desk
A managed service provider embedding automation inside its own contracts is a different customer from an end user: it carries the service obligation, it renews annually, and every one of its clients becomes reachable without a separate sale.
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Sarkor Telecom replaces its consumer tariff range from February 2026
Closing the entire consumer range to new sales while protecting the installed base is a deliberate split: it lets the company reprice acquisition without provoking churn among subscribers already on the network. The cost is a widening gap between what new and existing customers pay for the same service.
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TENIOS says it reached the ECCCSA final in two categories at its first attempt
Awards matter here less as recognition than as evidence: the entries rest on deployments already running in regulated utilities, with numbers a jury could check. That is a harder reference to assemble than a customer logo, and it is the currency enterprise buyers in Germany actually accept.
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Sarkor presents a new logo and visual identity
A rebrand is cheap to announce and expensive to carry through every interface, invoice and retail surface. The detail worth watching is not the logo but the sentence attaching it to a new company strategy — a strategy that has not otherwise been described publicly.
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Sarkor Telecom automates support calls with an Apifonica voice agent
Two portfolio companies trading with each other is worth more as evidence than as revenue. An operating business inside the group put a sister company's software in front of its own subscribers at moments of peak load during outages — the least forgiving test a supplier can be given, and one no reference call can substitute for.
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Sarkor Telecom revises tariffs from August 2025 and links the change to network investment
This is the clearest public statement the company has made about how it intends to fund its network: by repricing the base rather than by absorbing the cost. Whether that holds is measurable — the notice granted every subscriber an explicit right to terminate before the change took effect.
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Apifonica opens a Latin American push and shifts towards a partner-led model
A partner-led model trades gross margin for reach, and it is the only realistic way a company of this size sells into a region where it has no local presence. The test is whether the first agreement is followed by a second within the year.
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Sarkor Telecom offers routers in instalments through a fintech partner
Router rental keeps a small recurring fee on the bill but leaves the equipment on the operator's balance sheet. Financing the purchase through a third party moves the asset to the subscriber and the credit risk to the lender, while removing the up-front cost that deters connection.
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Sarkor Telecom raises speeds on twenty-five tariffs at no additional charge
Passing a network upgrade through to the existing base without repricing is a retention decision taken at the cost of near-term revenue. It is worth noting because the same company chose the opposite trade-off five months later, when the August tariff revision raised both speeds and prices.
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Apifonica puts a single SIP trunk behind a logistics operator in twelve markets
Infrastructure contracts of this shape are sticky. Once a customer's numbering, routing and billing run through one supplier in twelve countries, switching means renegotiating twelve local telecom relationships — which is precisely what the customer paid to avoid.
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TENIOS adds RCS business messaging for retail customers
RCS is a defensive as much as an offensive move: it keeps an incumbent SMS business relevant as the underlying channel is replaced. Verified sender identity is also the part a carrier can sell that a pure software vendor cannot.
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TENIOS reports agent transfers down to two per cent on a meter-reading programme
Utility meter readings are the least glamorous kind of call volume and the most durable: regulated, repetitive and annual. Automation that survives at this level of scale tends to stay in place, and the reference travels to every other municipal utility in the country.
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TENIOS partners with Deutsche Stadtmarketing to reach German small businesses
Reaching the Mittelstand one company at a time is slow and expensive. A channel partner that already advises those firms — and helps them access public funding — changes the unit economics of distribution rather than the product.
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Sarkor Telecom launches a cloud video surveillance service
An access provider that sells only bandwidth competes on price alone. A managed service delivered over the same fibre, with the hardware supplied and the footage stored by the operator, moves part of the revenue away from the tariff table and raises the cost of switching provider.
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Sarkor Telecom extends its network to Yangiyul, Keles and Chirchik
The company's fixed network has been a Tashkent city asset for its whole history. Serving three towns in the surrounding region is the first evidence in the public record that the footprint itself can grow, which changes the shape of the addressable market rather than the share of it.
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Sarkor Telecom ranked first among Uzbek internet providers in the 2022 marketing performance rating
Brand and marketing performance is not a soft metric for a consumer ISP: in a market where technical differences between providers are narrowing, it is a direct input into acquisition cost and churn.
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Sarkor Telecom takes part in consumer voting at Uzbekistan's Brand of the Year 2022 awards
The category was led by national operators with far larger audiences. Drawing more than a thousand consumer votes there is a modest signal, but it suggests the brand is recognised beyond its own subscriber base in Tashkent.
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Apifonica's HR voicebot cuts candidate screening for Domino's Pizza from about 40 hours to one
High-volume screening is the clearest case for communications automation: the work is repetitive, the value of speed is measurable, and once the process is embedded in a recruiting function it is rarely removed.
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Apifonica acquires TENIOS, entering the German cloud communications market
This is the pattern we look for in a platform business: a market entry bought rather than built, where the acquired company brings both customers and a capability the buyer would otherwise have spent years developing.