Quirky Contactual raises $9 million more — keeps us smiling

The great thing about Contactual is that it cracks us up every time we hear from them. The latest is they have raised $9 million more in cash in a round led by Leapfrog Ventures.

The San Mateo Web-hosted call center application helps companies manage all kinds of calls. We wrote about the company when it restarted a year and a half ago and changed its name from White Pajama.

This time we are amused by the reference in the story in VentureWire (sorry, no link this morning) to how the company has “managed to land 150 customers.” In our story from a year and a half ago, you will see that the company had landed 200 customers back then — so it has managed to lose customers, remain in the red, and still raise $9 million! (We don’t mean to slam them here; after all, it is the impudence of founder Mansour Salame that makes him so endearing. Also, VoIP is transforming the call center industry, and a start-up adapting to that trend has a fighting chance.)

Last time, it was when Salame told us about how he’d scooped up the company’s assets for $100,000 after the Internet bubble burst, after VCs had poured in $40 million and gone home frustrated (they aren’t talking with Salame, so granted it is no laughing matter for them). And then there’s the story about how the company was originally named White Pajama: Salame was disgusted by a colleague who had showed up to a critical partnership meeting in an embarrasingly loose and billowing white linen suit. They managed to win the partnership, despite the suit, so Salame pledged to name the company White Pajama.

Related link: Our post from when Don Lucas invested.

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