Reflecting on 2025: A Year of Innovation, Expansion, and Impact

2025 has been a remarkable chapter in First Orion’s story, marked by imagination, momentum, and purpose. This year, we pushed boundaries through bold innovations, forged powerful new partnerships, and reached milestones that once felt out of reach. 

Every breakthrough, collaboration, and success has brought us closer to our mission: building a world where communication is trusted, transparent, and empowering for everyone. 

As consumers continue to struggle with an epidemic of unwanted calls, our work is more critical than ever. Consumers received an average of 2.56 billion robocalls per month¹ in 2025. We believe the future of business voice communications is one where trust is restored, and this year, we made giant leaps toward that future. 

Protect+ Risk Detection: Securing the Inbound Channel 

First Orion launched Protect+ Risk Detection, an advanced solution designed to safeguard businesses from inbound spam and scam calls. Building on the success of our Branded Communications suite, this marks our first dedicated inbound offering, extending our protection capabilities to the conversations businesses receive. 

“Businesses are facing an unprecedented wave of nuisance and fraudulent calls, making it harder than ever to ensure legitimate conversations occur. Wasted time is wasted money,” said Josh Whitehurst, Head of Product at First Orion. “Protect+ is designed to give businesses full control over their inbound call security.” 

For call centers, Protect+ is transformative. By analyzing inbound traffic in real time, it identifies and filters out high-risk calls from fraudsters or known nuisance numbers, mitigating fraudulent activity in the calling queue and ensuring agents spend their valuable time on legitimate customer interactions. 

By securing both outbound and inbound channels, First Orion is helping businesses create a fully trusted voice environment, reducing the wasted time and money caused by high-risk calls. 

SENTRY Call Blocking: The Cornerstone of Call Authentication 

We expanded our SENTRY® Call Blocking solution to all three major U.S. mobile carriers. This industry milestone ensures broader protection for millions of mobile subscribers. By offering comprehensive spoof detection and prevention, SENTRY continues to set the standard for voice network integrity. 

The backbone of this innovation is Call Authentication, First Orion’s cornerstone technology for protecting both businesses and consumers. Call Authentication enables businesses to prove their calls are legitimate by verifying three critical elements: the business as the calling party, the party they are calling, and the precise timeframe of the call. This ensures that only legitimate calls receive branded display treatment, while spoofed calls are intercepted and blocked before reaching the customer. 

The expansion of SENTRY and its reliance on Call Authentication signals the end of easily spoofed anonymous business numbers, setting a new industry standard where verified identity is mandatory and making the phone call channel truly legitimate for the first time. 

This protection is critical. The scale of the problem is staggering: 31% of people report receiving scam phone calls at least daily, with 21% experiencing them several times a day². Nearly 90%³ expect businesses to safeguard consumers from spoofed calls and scammers. SENTRY, powered by Call Authentication, eliminates brand spoofing risk. This capability is vital, especially when First Orion helped identify more than 24 million scam calls in 2025 alone. 

Redefining Customer Engagement Through Branded Messaging 

We unveiled ENRICH Branded Messaging, revolutionizing how enterprises connect with customers through text. Built on Rich Communications Services (RCS), ENRICH moves beyond traditional SMS limitations by enabling secure, interactive, and visually rich communications, including images, carousels, and one-tap reply buttons. 

With ENRICH, businesses can deliver visually branded, verified messages that build trust and drive engagement, transforming everyday text into a powerful experience. This innovation is critical: 73% of B2B buyers actively avoid suppliers that send irrelevant messages, while service organizations are predicted to experience a 300% increase in fraud attempts over 2023 levels by 2027³. 

“First Orion’s history is rooted in voice protection and Branded Calling, and customers have long requested similar capabilities for messaging,” said Perry Claunch, Senior Director of Product Management at First Orion. “ENRICH Branded Messaging is more than a new communication channel. It’s a smarter, safer way to communicate through trust, interactivity, and simplicity. Best of all, it’s branded messaging unified across both voice and messaging channels.” 

Consistency and security were top priorities when we developed ENRICH. Customers have long requested similar branded capabilities for messaging to overcome the anxiety caused by anonymous texts. ENRICH ensures that a business’s identity is clearly displayed and verified in the messaging app. This is crucial because 87% of people say that when a business doesn’t properly identify itself on a call, it makes them appear illegitimate, a concern that extends to messaging. The benefit is clear: a unified, safer, and more engaging customer experience. 

Expanding Our Global Footprint 

This year marked a major step forward in international growth with the launch of First Orion’s Global Exchange. Designed as a next-generation platform, Global Exchange accelerates the secure exchange of branded and authenticated communications across borders, supporting our vision of a connected global ecosystem built on trust. 

For multinational enterprises, the Global Exchange offers unmatched scalability and a single interface to easily extend Branded Calling and protection to multiple geographies, simplifying a complex, fractured global communication landscape and ensuring brand consistency and trust for international calls. 

The Global Exchange is building the infrastructure for a globally transparent voice network. By enabling real-time insights and faster deployment across borders, it ensures that the standards for trust and authentication established in the U.S. are extended worldwide, making trusted cross-border communication a reality. 

“The Global Exchange is a transformative milestone for First Orion and our global partners,” Whitehurst said. “With this new version of our platform, we’ve reimagined our core technology to deliver real-time insights, faster deployment, and unmatched scalability.” 

Raising the Bar for Call Authentication 

We continued to strengthen partnerships with leading call originators by joining Somos, Inc., to expand call authentication integrations. 

This solution ensures that every call is validated at the source, securely transmitted, and confidently presented to the recipient, stopping spoofing, elevating brand trust, and empowering enterprises to take control of their voice communications. 

“This collaboration creates a powerful standard for trusted communications across the ecosystem,” said Jeff Stalnaker, President and Chief Financial Officer at First Orion. “Somos’ role in enabling enterprises with verified RTU ensures our authentication technology can deliver the strongest possible protections, including accurate branding that restores customer confidence in answering the phone.” 

Revolutionizing Customer Support with Advanced AI 

In 2025, First Orion deployed an Advanced AI Agent within our Zendesk infrastructure, transforming how we deliver customer service. The results have been remarkable: 35% of all conversations now involve the AI agent, achieving a 59% deflection rate while maintaining 85% message comprehension accuracy. 

By integrating product and customer data through Databricks, we created a context-aware system that provides instant, 24/7 support while empowering human agents to focus on complex, high-value interactions. 

“The ability to scale revenue without incremental headcount is providing huge value to First Orion,” said Mike Lloyd, Chief Information Officer at First Orion. 

The system’s success stems from our commitment to human-AI collaboration rather than replacement. Support teams gained unprecedented visibility into customer interactions through real-time analytics, enabling them to identify patterns, optimize dialogue flows, and continuously improve the customer experience. 

“An impressive feature about the agent is that it picks up patterns in what people are asking and suggests the most relevant use cases for us to build on in future releases,” said Julie Martinez, Product Support Analyst at First Orion. 

This intelligent feedback loop positions AI as a strategic asset across the business, from fraud detection to product development, demonstrating that technology should empower human excellence, not replace it. 

Self-Serve: Branded Calling for Small Businesses 

First Orion’s Self-Service offering for businesses making fewer than 150,000 calls per month took major leaps in 2025, cutting the time required to brand a phone call in half, from 10 minutes to 5 minutes. 

“This improvement was achieved by implementing smarter vetting and certification logic and streamlining the user experience,” said BK Smith, Head of Self-Service Solutions at First Orion. “These enhancements not only accelerate customer onboarding but reduce friction, improve data accuracy, and increase the likelihood that users complete their branding in a single session.” 

API for Business Number Registration: Automating Trust 

First Orion also launched an API for free Business Number Registration, allowing businesses to automate the process of registering and managing high volumes of phone numbers through code instead of manually through First Orion’s portal. 

Though First Orion’s free Business Number Registration takes less than 5 minutes, for enterprises and CPaaS providers managing millions of phone numbers, manual registration can slow down business. The API automates this critical step. 

“Businesses that have a large quantity of phone numbers for their own use or manage phone numbers on behalf of other businesses don’t have the capacity or resources to log in to the portal and complete registration and ongoing phone number management,” said Nesia Dotson, Associate Director of Product Marketing at First Orion. “Our API accommodates this need and provides access to these business types.” 

In addition to our API, our Business Number Registration watchlist discloses why a spam tag is assigned, providing much-needed transparency in the calling industry. 

“This is a step forward in educating the industry on the problem and consumer-friendly calling practices,” Dotson said. “The more businesses that resolve tagging issues, the more opportunity we have to display a brand for businesses investing in Branded Calling.” 

Reaching New Milestones 

Every milestone tells a story, and in 2025, ours spoke volumes. When we surpassed 10 million branded calls in a single day, it was proof that businesses and consumers alike believe in a more open, authentic way to connect. 

“Achieving 10 million branded calls in a day is a clear sign of the trust our partners and customers have in First Orion,” said Scott Hambuchen, CEO at First Orion. “It reinforces our commitment to leading the way in transparent, trusted communication and challenges us to keep setting new benchmarks for the industry.” 

Our achievements didn’t go unnoticed. First Orion was honored with two Visionary Spotlight Awards from ChannelVision Magazine, recognizing leadership and innovation in branded communication and call protection technology. Additionally, First Orion was named “Telecommunications Solution Provider of the Year” in the prestigious 2025 Mobile Breakthrough Awards for restoring trust in voice communications. 

“This recognition from Mobile Breakthrough reinforces our belief that trust is the cornerstone of modern communication,” Hambuchen said. “We’re proud to lead the way in restoring confidence in the phone call and helping brands connect with customers transparently and reliably.” 

Looking Ahead 

In 2026, we’ll continue strengthening a world where communication is open, authentic, and trusted, empowering businesses, protecting consumers, and setting new benchmarks for transparency. 

We’re deeply grateful to our partners, clients, and team members who have made this past year unforgettable. Together, we’re building connections and shaping the way the world communicates. 

Sources:  

1. Public Interest Research Group 
2. Pew Research  
3. Transunion 
4. Gartner