Most people never think about the technology that carries a business phone call, a video meeting, or a quick team message. Yet behind those everyday moments sits an entire industry known as cloud communications, and within it a category called unified communications as a service, or UCaaS. The idea is simple. Instead of buying and maintaining physical phone systems in a back office, a company rents voice, video, messaging, and contact center tools that run over the internet. Demand for these services grew sharply as remote and hybrid work became common, and the tools have stayed central to how organizations operate. The field is crowded with familiar names, from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) with its Teams product to Cisco Systems, (NASDAQ: CSCO) and its Webex service, alongside specialists such as Zoom Communications, (NASDAQ: ZM), RingCentral (NYSE: RNG), and 8×8, Inc. (NASDAQ: EGHT).
In this business, growth is measured one user at a time. Providers typically charge a monthly fee for every seat, meaning every employee who uses the service. As the number of seats climbs, so does the steady, recurring revenue that investors tend to prize. Some companies sell directly to businesses. Others take a different route and license their underlying software to other service providers, who then package it under their own brand. That wholesale approach can be less visible to the public, yet it can also scale quickly and carry attractive profit margins.
One company built almost entirely around that licensing model is Crexendo, Inc. (NASDAQ: CXDO). Based in Phoenix, it provides cloud communications, UCaaS, and collaboration software both directly and through its NetSapiens platform, which powers voice, video, and messaging for other providers. Compared with the industry giants, Crexendo is tiny, a company valued at a little over $200 million that many investors have never heard of. What it lacks in size, though, it has been making up for in growth.
The company shared a milestone that helps explain why. Its platform now supports more than 8 million users worldwide, up by roughly one million since it passed the 7 million mark in late 2025. Measured against where it stood after acquiring NetSapiens in 2021, when the platform served about 1.7 million users, that base has grown more than 370%. Today the software reaches those users through a network of over 250 service provider subscribers, plus Crexendo’s own direct customers.
For a UCaaS business, that user count is not a vanity figure. It is the closest thing the industry has to a core scoreboard, because each additional seat tends to translate into more recurring revenue over time. Crexendo’s licensing model adds a second layer to the story. Selling a platform to other providers, rather than signing up every end customer directly, means the company can add large numbers of users without a matching jump in its own costs. Its most recent results showed annual revenue of roughly $80 million and rising profits, modest figures next to its larger rivals but notable for a company still in expansion mode. That is one reason a business its size can grow at a healthy clip while remaining consistently profitable, a combination that is far from guaranteed among small technology companies.
Reaching 8 million users will not suddenly put Crexendo on equal footing with Microsoft or Zoom, and it does not need to. The more telling point is direction. A modest company competing in a market dominated by household names has kept adding users year after year, quietly proving that its platform can hold its own. For anyone trying to understand where cloud communications is heading, the steady rise of a lesser-known player is a useful reminder that the industry’s story is not written by its largest names alone.
