Founder of Plum Voice aims to accelerate AI-driven growth while sharpening the company's focus on customer care

INDIANAPOLIS, IN — July 24, 2026 — Sharpen, the modular customer contact center platform for voice, messaging, and AI, today announced the appointment of Matt Ervin as Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. Ervin joins Sharpen at a pivotal moment for the contact center industry, as businesses race to deploy conversational AI that resolves customer requests without sacrificing security or service quality. He will lead Sharpen's next phase of growth by expanding the company's AI Voice Agents, AI Sidekick agent-assist tools, and automation capabilities. Ervin has made clear that customer satisfaction is the measure that matters and said Sharpen's AI investments should be directed toward that objective. "AI is only worth deploying if it makes customer care better—faster answers, less friction, and more time for agents to help the people who need them," Ervin said. "Sharpen has built a genuinely modular platform that lets teams add AI voice agents, dialing, IVR, and secure payments without ripping out their stack. My job is to point all of that at one goal: exceptional care for our customers and theirs. I'm honored to lead this team." Ervin brings a rare combination of operating and investing experience to the role. He is the founder and CEO of Infer Health and was founder and CEO of Plum Voice, an enterprise voice automation company. As a graduate of Harvard University, he worked as an investment professional at Baron Capital and AllianceBernstein earlier in his career. His background in voice technology and enterprise software positions him to accelerate Sharpen's AI roadmap while keeping customer care at the center of the company's strategy. Notably, Plum Voice—the company Ervin founded—is part of the Sharpen family, making his appointment a full-circle moment for the platform's voice heritage. Under Ervin's leadership, Sharpen will continue to serve customers across financial services, healthcare, retail and e-commerce, education and the public sector. The company's platform pairs core inbound contact center capabilities with outbound sales dialing, modern IVR, SMS and messaging, number remediation, and secure Pay-by-Phone, unified by shared omnichannel, no-code automation (Logic+), agent-assist (AI Sidekick), and reporting (Insights) tools. The Sharpen family also includes two specialized products that extend the platform. Plum Voice brings the enterprise voice and IVR technology customers have long relied on to a broader platform, deepening Sharpen's automated voice and self-service capabilities. Ytel adds a sales-focused contact center and dialer built to boost live answer rates, with Trusted Calling to identify and remediate "Spam Likely" mislabels, STIR/SHAKEN-compliant high-quality voice, dynamic call strategies, and integrations with tools such as Salesforce, Zapier, and Zoho. Together, Plum Voice and Ytel give Sharpen customers a deeper bench of voice automation and outbound sales capabilities under one platform. About Sharpen Sharpen is a modular customer contact center platform for voice, messaging, and AI. Sharpen helps businesses reduce wait times, increase customer satisfaction, and automate customer interactions—deploying as a complete standalone cloud contact center or layering on top of a company's existing tools. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, Sharpen serves organizations across financial services, healthcare, retail, education, the public sector, and small and midsize business. Learn more at sharpencx.com. Media Contact Melissa Schmitz, Head of Marketing Sharpen mschmitz@sharpencx.com (218) 277-0408