Hiya wants to make the phone worth answering again

At a company event in New York in October 2023, Hiya’s then chief product officer, James Lau, demonstrated a scam involving his own boss. He found a finance employee on LinkedIn, took a recording of CEO Alex Algard from YouTube, cloned Algard’s voice and used another app to spoof the phone number. The ingredients were public. The authority was manufactured.

The demonstration exposed a weakness in an everyday habit: we recognize a voice and treat recognition as evidence. Hiya had spent years helping people decide whether to answer the phone. Now it had to consider what happened when a convincing impostor was already speaking.

A familiar voice, manufactured

The uncomfortable part of Lau’s demonstration was its ordinariness. It required no access to the CEO’s private recordings. A public appearance supplied the voice; a professional profile supplied a plausible target. A fraudster could borrow the scenery of office life and arrive sounding like someone entitled to give instructions.

“Now, we can no longer use someone's voice as a way to authenticate them.”James Lau, then chief product officer, at Hiya’s 2023 summit

That observation helps explain Hiya’s position in the market. Telephone security used to concentrate on the number arriving at the handset. Hiya still does that work. Its portfolio now also includes synthetic-voice detection, caller screening and tools for businesses whose perfectly legitimate calls are treated with the same suspicion as everything else.

Distribution before downloads

Algard founded Hiya as a Whitepages spin-off in 2016. The connection makes sense: Whitepages dealt in identity and telephone numbers; Hiya took that knowledge to the moment a phone rang. Samsung Smart Call put the service inside a familiar dialer. AT&T provided another route to users. The company did not have to persuade every recipient to find a new app before it could be useful.

In October 2017, Hiya raised an $18 million Series A led by Balderton Capital, with Nautilus Venture Partners and Lumia Capital participating. The announced purpose was global expansion. Hiya’s own subsequent history records carrier relationships in Norway, Canada, the UK and Latin America. Its current homepage reports more than 550 million people protected and over 28 billion calls analyzed each month. Those are company-reported network figures, not a census of paying app subscribers.

The distinction matters. A consumer app competes for a place on a home screen and for permission to intervene. A network integration sits along a route the call already takes. Operators can deploy warnings or blocking without requiring a separate download, according to the service they offer. Samsung’s implementation has its own settings and availability. Distribution comes with local rules, rather than one identical experience everywhere.

This is Hiya’s most useful competitive distinction. Truecaller offers a recognizable alternative for consumer caller ID and blocking; First Orion overlaps in branded calling and protection. Hiya brings consumer software, business identity and operator integrations into the same company. Its advantage depends on which networks and devices actually carry those services.

The business that wants you to pick up

Blocking unwanted calls creates a second problem worth selling a solution to. A bank, a repair company or a delivery service may also arrive as an unknown number. The recipient’s sensible defense becomes the business’s missed appointment. Spam has made even good manners look suspicious.

Hiya Connect, launched in 2019, addresses that side of the call. Branded Call lets a business present its name, with a logo and call reason where supported, and monitor results. Number Registration is the free, separate step that helps establish a number as belonging to a legitimate business. Registration does not replace the caller display, and neither registration nor branding promises immunity from spam labels.

Enercare, the Canadian home-services company, supplies a concrete example. Hiya’s account of its pilot reports a 48% increase in answer rate, a 41% increase in calls lasting longer than a minute and a 95% decrease in spam flagging. Appointments booked rose 16%. These are vendor-published pilot results, rather than a forecast for another company. Still, they separate an attractive intermediate measure - people answering - from the work the business actually wanted done.

The business model follows these different jobs. Hiya sells software and integrations to operators, device makers and enterprises, alongside consumer apps with paid features. Branded Call is available through monthly plans or pay as you go, with custom enterprise arrangements. The public pricing page lists a $25 USD one-time security setup fee and says charges apply to calls that display branding. The useful purchasing question is how many of your actual outbound calls can receive it.

A report card for the ring

In September 2025, Hiya introduced Caller Reputation in cooperation with AT&T. The free product exposes spam status and grades four things: number maturity, whether people connect, whether they remain engaged, and whether they complain or block. A business can inspect the consequences of its calling practices before deciding whether to spend on branding.

Zoom Drain of Washington used caller identity and reputation tools after missed calls and spoofing complaints interfered with its work. Its Hiya case study describes giving team members a business caller name and marking inbound-only lines as Do Not Originate. That designation tells the system that an outbound call claiming one of those numbers is suspect. A plumber’s telephone problem quickly becomes a scheduling problem: the technician cannot coordinate a visit with somebody who will not answer.

There is an appealingly unglamorous lesson here. Before changing a sales script, inspect whether the script ever gets heard. Review your numbers, recipient feedback and calling behavior. A display name cannot make an unwelcome call welcome indefinitely. Complaints still count.

Following the fraud into the call

Hiya acquired Loccus.ai in July 2024 and brought its technology into AI Voice Detection. That widened the task from analyzing calling patterns to examining audio for signs of synthesis or manipulation. Communications platforms and contact centers can integrate the technology. A synthetic-voice signal is useful evidence; it does not, by itself, establish a speaker’s intentions.

Hiya AI Phone adds another consumer route, with screening, real-time scam protection, transcripts and summaries. The product page offers a 14-day trial and specifies US availability. This is distinct from the Hiya technology inside Samsung Smart Call. One product helps manage an individual’s conversations; another supplies protection inside a device or operator service.

The operator route continues to grow. On September 28, 2026, Hiya announced app-free nuisance-call protection with Bouygues Telecom. The announcement scheduled consumer availability for October 5 at €2 per month per line, and business availability for October 12 at €1, depending on subscription eligibility. Those are the operator’s announced retail prices. They show how call protection can become a service on a phone bill.

Try the smallest useful experiment

For a business, the sensible starting point is free registration and a reputation check. Then test branded calling against the outcome that matters: completed service visits, right-person conversations or appointments, as well as answer rate. Check coverage before estimating a return. Hiya’s September 2026 support guidance says business names travel more widely than logos and call reasons; iPhone recipients receive the name only. Richer displays depend on supported Android app or Samsung Smart Call paths and device conditions.

For an individual, the first step may simply be checking the protection already available through a carrier or Samsung phone. The deeper lesson from Hiya’s own demonstration survives every product choice: familiarity is fallible. We learned to distrust the unknown caller. The harder task is learning how to trust the apparently known one.