Hiya is a Seattle-based company that provides spam and fraud call protection and identity services to more than 400 million users around the globe.

History

Hiya was initially developed as a caller-ID app for

Whitepages A telephone directory, commonly called a telephone book, telephone address book, phonebook, or the white and yellow pages, is a listing of telephone subscribers in a geographical area or subscribers to services provided by the organization tha ...

. In April 2016, Hiya was spun off from Whitepages; by that time, the Hiya app had 25 million downloads. Whitepages' founder, Alex Algard Sr stepped down from the parent company to focus on leading Hiya, which, as of December 2020, employs 120. In February 2016, Hiya, then part of Whitepages, reached a deal with

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

to integrate its caller profile and spam protection services into all Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge phones in 16 countries. The company extended its partnership with

in a separate deal in August 2016 to include its service on the Galaxy Note 7 and to expand the partnership to a total of 28 countries. In August 2016, Hiya launched Hiya Cloud, its network-level caller ID and call-blocking offering. After offering only a limited version of its app for iPhones, Hiya announced in September 2016 that the full version of its app would be available on iOS 10. Soon after, Hiya began providing spam protection services to

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

phones through the AT&T Call Protect product. In 2017, Hiya entered a similar partnership with

ZTE ZTE Corporation is a Chinese partially state-owned technology company that specializes in telecommunication. Founded in 1985, ZTE is listed on both the Hong Kong and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. ZTE's core business is wireless, exchange, optic ...

to provide call spam protection services for all Axon 7 users. In October 2017, Hiya announced it had received its first outside funding: a Series A of $18 million led by

Balderton Capital Balderton Capital is a venture capital firm based in London, UK, that invests in early-stage, technology and internet startup companies in Europe. It is considered to be among the four-biggest venture capital firms in the English capital. Foun ...

with participation from Nautilus Venture Partners and Lumia Capital. Hiya said it would use the funds to expand globally. Following the investment, Balderton’s Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, an early executive at

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery (Uber Eats and Postmates), package ...

and

Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropb ...

, joined Hiya’s board.

Features

Users can report numbers associated with unwanted calls through the app as well as block future calls from certain phone numbers.

References

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External links

Official website
Companies based in Seattle Telecommunications companies of the United States Caller ID