Canopy debuts a mind-blowing cloud-based VoIP to face Google Voice

by Kari Henley
April 8, 2014

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Move over Magic Jack, Vonage, Google Voice and all the other annoying workarounds to landlines. A Boulder-based company has come up with a VoIP that actually works, and is bringing mobile phones into the mix as well. Canopy is coming at this crowded market with a recently launched enterprise-class cloud-based VoIP and mobile phone system with unlimited usage. Canopy began last November in beta trials, and has been in development for 28 months since CEO Kyle Cleveland realized the gap in the market in the space between enterprise and small business.

“I am an inventor, or a maker type of person,” Cleveland said. “I was never an armchair engineer.” So after working at Avaya, designing products for Fortune 100 companies, he turned to starting his own venture.

“I saw the pain with small companies’ communications systems and I thought, 'If we can turn off a washing machine with an iPhone, why should we be stuck with Comcast or pricey cloud based offerings, or something like Vonage that you can’t scale?'" Cleveland said. "I wanted to offer solutions that make life easier, save money, help small businesses be more productive and also be fun to use.”

With its drag-and-drop interface, that's exactly what Canopy is doing: allowing customers to select their hardware, bring in existing devices, control numbers and benefit from sophisticated services. With the mobile platform officially kicking off this week, Canopy will serve as an alternative mobile service provider with unlimited voice, text and 2GB of data on Sprint’s 4G LTE network at a 60 percent savings. Verizon and AT&T are in the works.

“People can have an account for free and a device for free to test it out and play around,” said Cleveland. “The value of Canopy is we can expose mobile just like VoIP and offer unique features like ring groups, light up hold buttons, and in a small business setting where 92 percent of workers only use mobile phones, we can open up a whole new world  - allowing businesses to craft the way they want to work.”

When landlines and mobile phones are jointly set up under a Canopy account, the system allows flexibility to create cloud communication capabilities like bouncing from a mobile to a desk phone. A staff member can be talking on the cell, walk in the office and pick up the desk phone without losing the call.

Marketing team member Heather Cleveland, wife of Kyle, shared an example of the value of Canopy in her experience of running a small local theatre company that could not afford an office phone system. Everyone used their personal cells to get by during the day. However, at night, when customers were calling to get tickets instead of going online, she had to change her voicemail to sound like it was the box office – and then remember to change it back the next day. When returning calls, the caller ID showed her name instead of the theatre. Luckily various Canopy features like Groundwire VoIP app and Time-Of-Day Routing feature came to the rescue for the small business.

Jobs at Canopy Inc.

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