Hiya is a Seattle-based company that provides spam and fraud call protection and identity services to more than 500 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 that ...

. In April 2016, Hiya was spun off from Whitepages; by that time, the Hiya app had 25 million downloads. Whitepages' founder, Alex Algard 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 Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

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., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

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, opti ...

to provide call spam protection services for all Axon 7 users.

Funding

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 company, startup companies in Europe. It is considered to be among the four-biggest venture capital firms in the English ...

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. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, a ...

and

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

, joined Hiya’s board.

Partnerships

In November 2023, Hiya partnered with Liberty Latin America for spam and fraud protection. In February 2024, Hiya partnered with

Virgin Media O2 VMED O2 UK Limited, trading as Virgin Media O2, is a British mass media and telecommunications company based in Reading, England. The company was formed in June 2021 as a 50–50 joint venture between Liberty Global and Telefónica through ...

to work together on AI-powered spam and fraud protection. Samsung has extended its strategic partnership with Hiya through 2025 to automatically block fraud calls on the new Galaxy Note20.

Features

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

References

{{reflist

External links

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