Tal Elyashiv, CEO of Yallo, and Yosi Taguri, CTO of Yallo. Photo Credit: PR

Millennials are abandoning the phone call in droves in favor of text messages. Yallo thinks it can bring them back with a lot of bells and whistles

Yallo, whose goal is to add bells and whistles to the experience of a telephone call, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $4 million in Series A funding from Carmel Ventures, which is a member of the Viola Group.

Shlomo Dovrat, Co-Founder and General Partner at Carmel, led the investment and has joined the Company’s board of directors.

Yallo is a B2C communications provider whose goal is to re-enchant smartphone users with the telephone call. It seeks to create phone calls “that are more effective, more social, and more fun than the phone calls we knew until now.”

If you’re not a Millennial, you may not be aware that phone calls have dipped in popularity of late, in the face of the far more popular text messages.

Among other features, Yallo allows you to easily record calls, search through past phone calls and even replay them or tag them. In addition, the app allows you to reach people even when they are on another call, tag calls, own multiple numbers, never lose a call when they are temporarily out of reception, receive calls on devices of their choice, and much more.

In an interview with Geektime, the company’s CEO Tal Elyashiv said his plan for the future includes “continuing to innovate and bring the phone call into the 21st century, for both personal and B2B use. We believe that voice communications have not fulfilled their potential and could undergo as much innovation as texting platforms like WhatsApp have done. Developing technology for telephones is complex, especially given the fact that phone networks are still mixed.”

Phone calls are so 20th century

In case you’re wondering why telephone calls need to be brought up to speed, Yosi Taguri, CTO of Yallo explained in a statement that “before Yallo, the phone call was a vestige of the past, failing to keep up with the way we communicate today: in groups; with messaging that lets us get someone’s attention even when they’re busy; with precision; with fun and personalization. Yallo makes all that possible. It is turning the phone call into a platform for entertainment, personalization, organization, storage, and a tool for radical efficiency.”

The company was founded in 2012 by Tal Elyashiv and Yosi Taguri and currently has 15 employees at its headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel. The app was in beta till now but is now available for download on Android.

Translated by Simona Weinglass