Steve Smith is the Founder and CEO of Fonative, the regulatory ready, Compliant Communications® company. Steve guides the company’s vision, strategy, and leadership team and keeps close watch on the firm’s product and CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) technology platform. A successful entrepreneur and technologist, Steve established Fonative to respond to the shift to cloud communications that he saw as the wave of the future.
In 2015, Fonative developed its robust CPaaS that entered production the following year and currently powers more than 100 U.S. contact centers representing thousands of agents and millions of calls and texts per month. Prior to founding Fonative, he served as CTO and Chief Scientist at Lavalife, a North American market leader in web, voice, and mobile dating products. During his tenure, Steve migrated 12,000 PRI lines to VoIP and realized large cost savings for the VoIP infrastructure that garnered industry awards.
As a member of Jeff Pulver’s VON advisory board, Steve was a frequent speaker at industry conferences during the transformative years when telecommunications migrated to VoIP.
In addition to leading Fonative as CEO, Steve serves part-time as a Managing Director for Dunn Rush & Co. LLC, a Boston-based investment bank where he lends his expertise in technology, media, and telecommunications.
Steve graduated with distinction from Cornell University in 1984 with a degree in Computer Science and currently holds three patents in areas related to voice call processing.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-smith-086131/