Alianza's Crux protects the phone number as telcos brace for 'experience providers'

Alianza CEO Brian Beutler unveiled Crux, an AI platform for communications service providers, at the company's Navigate '26 customer event, warning telcos that AI application companies are coming for the business end of the phone call. Beutler said funding for such companies went from $260 million in 2023 to an expected $28 billion this year, a 108-fold jump, and Revmo AI founder and CEO Ryan Louis said his three-year-old, 15-person company is targeting a billion-dollar valuation on roughly $50 million in recurring revenue within 18 months. Revmo customer Donatos reported its voice AI agent handled 301,388 calls across 174 stores with 71% conversion and 99.9% accuracy.

Featured Story T-Mobile rips into Starlink's mobile 'threat' T-Mobile CFO Peter Osvaldik says SpaceX's Starlink is not a competitive threat in wireless and lambasted the company's various mobile network plans. Alianza CEO Brian Beutler named his AI platform Crux after the hardest pitch on a climb. He's right about the danger of falling, and telcos need to figure out what the rope is attached to. Brian Beutler has what it takes to reach the top. Will his customers? The Alianza CEO climbed the Grand Teton this summer with his two older sons, up the full Exum Ridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exum Ridge , roughly 2,000 vertical feet of technical climbing broken into 20 pitches. On any serious route, there is one section called the crux, the hardest and most dangerous part, where a climber's preparation either holds or it doesn't. On the Exum Ridge, the crux is a slab called the friction pitch, named for what you have to trust, because there's almost nothing to hold. You press your hands and your shoes into the granite and go up on balance, with 1,700 feet of open air under your heels. That was Beutler's inspiration in naming Alianza's new platform https://www.alianza.com/whats-new/alianza-crux-powering-cognitive-communications/ . "The crux is not where you decide if you're really committed to standing on the summit," he told the crowd at the company's Navigate '26 https://navigate26.alianza.com/ customer event last week. "The crux is where you find out if you already were." That's a bracing thing to say to a room full of customers, and it's one of the most interesting things I heard at the conference. It wasn't so much a sales pitch as a verdict delivered in advance. The outcome is already set by work you either did or didn't do, and the climb just tells you which. Beutler deserves a mountain of credit for telling a room of service providers that a wave of AI application companies is coming for the business end of the phone call, as we know it. Alianza counts hundreds of venture-backed startups building vertical voice products for restaurants, lawyers, electricians and contractors. If telcos sit this out, "voice networks will get bypassed completely, and we will become the one thing we swore we never would be," he said. In its presentation on Crux, Alianza defines experiences as "intelligent applications and workflows that participate in or act on communications" and experience providers are "the companies that build and deliver them." Beutler also said funding for those kinds of companies went from $260 million in 2023 to an expected $28 billion this year, a 108-fold jump. He didn't break down what all those figures include, so here I'll treat it as more of a mood than a measurement. The larger point is that a big wave of funding and the companies in that space need an easy way into a conversation. Just outside Phoenix, years ago, Ryan Louis was driving to the gym at 6 a.m. in a gas-powered car and thought about getting an oil change later in the day. He called a Jiffy Lube to book one or at least leave a message. Twelve rings, nobody home. So he called the franchise group instead and sold them an AI solution that always answers the phone. Louis is founder and CEO of Revmo AI, which had a booth in the Navigate showcase as one of the first experience providers on Crux. The company employs 15 people and is about three years old. Largely bootstrapped, he said, out of a prior venture. Louis said his revenue is up sixfold last year, and he's targeting another sixfold and a billion-dollar valuation on roughly $50 million in recurring revenue in the next 18 months. The deployments are public and the numbers are real. One of Revmo's customers, Donatos, said in September https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/donatos-and-revmo-share-results-of-systemwide-voice-ai-rollout-71-conversion-and-99-9-accuracy-across-174-stores-302555116.html that the pizza chain's agent handled 301,388 calls across 174 stores, pushed order conversion from 58% to 71%, and produced about 26,500 additional orders. Revmo and Stonebriar Auto Services said in January https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/revmo-ai-and-stonebriar-auto-services-llc-expand-collaboration-to-109-jiffy-lube-locations-revolutionizing-customer-experience-302345226.html that across 109 Jiffy Lube locations, the agent brought in about 23 new customers per shop per month and roughly $6,000 a month per location in attributed revenue. And here's the kicker: Revmo doesn't sell minutes or seats. "Our business model is really outcomes driven," Louis said. "We're charging Donatos for every pizza order that we book. So if we're not booking pizza orders, then they're not paying us any money." Six thousand dollars a month of attributed revenue, riding on a small-business phone line that rents for a few tens of dollars, and none of that money touches the phone company. Alianza's answer is a platform that sits in the call path. Crux tags a line as AI-ready, checks on each call whether that line has an "experience" attached, plays a consent and privacy announcement, logs that the caller stayed on, and then either hands the call to an AI agent or forks the media to an intelligence partner. Controlled availability opened September 9, with commercial availability planned for the first half of 2027. The pitch to the AI companies is all about reach. Integrate once, Beutler told the keynote crowd, and an experience provider can "simply and securely interact with the billions of conversations flowing over the networks of any participating service provider." They would also, he said, "gain valuable routes to market in partnership with service providers." Then Beutler brought both sides together. "One side has the intelligence and needs access to the conversation," he said. "The other side has the conversations and needs access to the intelligence." Revmo's Louis described the problem Crux solves. Revmo runs a self-serve sales funnel that lets companies build their own AI agents. When a prospect comes to the website, Revmo pulls their listing data and builds an agent from it, and hands them a test number to call. Then comes the fork. You can keep your number and forward the calls or port it to the new number to keep the added AI capabilities. About 80% of the prospects quit right there. "Nobody wants to forward their telephone number off," Alianza's chief product and technology officer, Dag Peak, told Light Reading. Nobody wants to port their phone. That dropout, he said, is "a real problem for the EPs," and Crux removes it. The agent attaches to the number where it already lives. Alianza announced it was buying Skribby https://www.alianza.com/whats-new/alianza-aquires-skribby/ , the Belgian meeting-bot company, the day after launching Crux, so it could extend the same promise beyond the phone network. The point, Chief Growth Officer Jonathan Wagner told Light Reading, was "to be able to pick up conversations that are happening outside the carrier network within the Teams platforms and the meetings platforms out there." For Louis, his direct sales team targets mid-market and up, where the payback on hiring a salesperson pencils out. For small businesses, "we need help with the distribution," he said. The consent gate deserves credit too. The status quo, which Louis confirmed is how Revmo operates today, is every voice AI vendor writing its own disclosure policy with its own lawyers, customer by customer and state by state. Crux does it once, in the network, and keeps the record. Beutler's case to the operator leads with fear. "If service providers don't participate in this AI voice economy, they will eventually lose these voice customers," he told Light Reading. "They're porting, like they will port out. The intelligence will be where the value sits, and the commodity of the connectivity will follow." From there he laid out what he called three levels of service provider economic participation in the Crux platform. The first is simply not losing the customer. "Protect your core voice business by opening the network to intelligent integration and extensibility," he said. "That's number one." The second is referral. Operators "who understand the demographics of their customers," he said, will promote particular experiences into their base and work hand in hand with a vendor "that might have a really great solution for landscapers, a really great solution for restaurants, a really great solution for legal or financial services." The two sides could "partner on a distribution deal, and they'll work out some sort of revenue sharing between the two." The third is selling it yourself. Some telcos, he said, will decide they "want to play a much more active role than just referring." They might white-label or private-label it as a service-provider-branded experience, "and that would have a different set of economics because they're taking more of the responsibility." Beutler made his argument and closed his keynote with: "Alianza is not the hero of the story. You are." The heroes of what he calls the cognitive era will be service providers and experience providers "who together can build exponentially more value than either can on their own," he said. I asked Beutler what an operator would take on with a hypothetical $200-a-month AI receptionist flowing through Crux. He noted that on the middle tier, a 20% share of that product "would be more than, in some cases, double what they're collecting on the basic voice line," he said. "So the average revenue per user contribution of integrating with these experience providers is significant." Twenty percent of $200 is $40. In Revmo's case study, that conversation was worth about $6,000 a month to the business on the other end. I know that attributed revenue isn't margin, so don't come at me. Also, I know the $200-a-month AI receptionist was a thing I made up. While I was having fun with numbers, something stood out: A network operator's upside gets measured against what a phone line costs. But the value of the call, and the value in the call, gets measured in real business outcomes, like cars lined up outside Jiffy Lube bays and piping hot pizzas heading out the door at Donatos. That's what Beutler said would happen. He said the intelligence is where the value sits, and connectivity as a commodity follows. The first tier of service provider participation in Crux is churn prevention with a platform strategy on top. It's also the only tier that doesn't depend on an operator learning to sell software. Beutler's analogy for all of this is Visa, and it's a good story. Decades ago, bank cards were a fragmented market and an outsider called Diners Club tried to solve that problem by building its own network of participating banks and merchants, connecting them together and bypassing all the banks that didn't want to play. Those bypassed banks responded by building Visa, an open platform with a two-sided ecosystem that still pays them 50 years later. The catch is that the banks owned Visa. Alianza and its investors own Crux. Beutler argued the ownership isn't the lesson; the open platform and the two-sided ecosystem are, and he pointed to Spotify, Airbnb and Zillow as vendor-owned versions that worked. Fair enough. But a two-sided market only works when one integration buys you access to everybody. Crux is just beginning, and Louis said as much when I asked whether Alianza already had all the service providers he'd need wired up. "That's a relationship that we need to build," he said. "We are now establishing partnerships through Alianza with the different service providers, so that we can enable it on their infrastructure." In other words, Revmo is still building its empire one carrier connection at a time. That's not a criticism of Alianza, which opened controlled availability just last week. The flywheel is just getting going, and Beutler said plainly at a lunch meeting that the biggest carriers in the world will be the hardest to win. The question I hope to pose at next year's Navigate: Does the Visa analogy hold up if Crux doesn't land a Tier 1 carrier and all the phone numbers they represent? Meanwhile, Crux is one lane among several for Revmo, which is also building through listing data, scheduling software, point-of-sale systems and an automotive ERP partnership. The telco side moves at its own pace, but nobody on the demand side is waiting around. Beutler's friction pitch metaphor is so good that we may as well follow it all the way down. What makes that section of a climb tougher than hell isn't the exposure. It's that there's nothing to pull on. You can't muscle through it, you can't borrow anything from the rock, and you can't decide halfway up to be a different climber than the one who started. You go up on what you already brought. Alianza has read the weather correctly, called out the danger ahead, and built something that removes a specific and expensive piece of friction. That's more than many vendors in this industry have done. We'll see, at some point, how much telcos can get paid as more nimble companies extract value from conversations on their network. In climbing, Beutler says the crux is where you find out what you already were. Telcos may be about to do just that. By the time you're standing on the slab, the preparation is over. There's nowhere to go but up maybe .