Taiwanese conversation management tool Cooby just announced that it has raised $2.9 million to date led by Sequoia India’s Surge and Pear VC.
Cooby is Surge’s first startup founded and based in Taiwan. Also, it is a part of Surge’s sixth cohort of 20 companies that build fresher and smarter solutions to help consumers and businesses adapt to a changing world.
“Since October 2021, we have expanded our customer base to Germany, India, Indonesia, Singapore, and the US. Additionally, in the last three months, we’ve seen the user base of our WhatsApp inbox productivity Chrome extension grow by 350%, and it is now being used in 80+ countries. We look forward to further strengthening our Cooby Workspace product with the funds raised, on top of expanding our team to countries like Singapore and other parts of the world” said Wen Shaw, CEO and Co-founder of Cooby.
Individuals have shared positive feedback on Cooby’s Extension, while businesses have also reviewed the product favourably, commending the convenience it provides. Pascal Lammers, the Head of Digitisation of Mission Mittelstand GmbH said “Cooby has created a huge impact in our coaching team as they are now able to easily navigate through their inboxes and work effectively. Features like the tabs, mentions, and mark all as read have saved us at least 20% of time spent on WhatsApp. We recommend Cooby to any business using WhatsApp for sales and customer support.”
Who is behind Cooby?
Cooby was established by Wen Shaw and Jocelin Ho in 2020. Ho graduated from Stanford with a Master’s in Electrical Engineering and worked as a Tech Lead at Instagram and Facebook. Her previous experience includes roles at Google, Ericsson and Gogolook. Shaw is an alumnus of Columbia University. He has worked as a Product Manager at Facebook, Dropbox along with other experiences at IBM, Touch of Modern and Percolata.
What problem does it resolve?
With over two billion active users across the globe, WhatsApp is one of the world’s most popular apps. An increasing number of sales teams are using the platform to engage new prospects and existing clients. Sales conversations happen through messaging apps because customers prefer more collaborative and real-time communication.
Businesses understand this, but many struggle to engage their leads and existing clients through WhatsApp and other messaging platforms. They grapple with issues like data ownership, transparency, visibility, activity tracking and legal protection due to the lack of data integration on WhatsApp.
This is where Cooby comes to play as it equips these teams with WhatsApp work number setup, data sync, analytics dashboard, alerts and notifications, and collaboration interface to regulate WhatsApp and enhance their sales.
The company also provides visibility to customer conversations and sales activities on a unified platform.
Cooby Workspace makes collaboration on WhatsApp possible without all the back-and-forths, aggregate all customer contacts, and provides clear and actionable analytics that enables teams to track, improve and grow.
What does Cooby do?
Cooby is a conversation management solution for WhatsApp and other business messaging channels. The company re-imagines sales management for a messaging-first world by building the best-in-class engagement and team management solutions on top of popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and LINE.
The tool helps businesses streamline engagement and individuals to organise their customer conversations and boost inbox productivity.
Cooby’s team management solution provides full transparency into WhatsApp and LINE, enabling a smooth flow of data, information, and feedback that empowers each and every level of the sales organisation to evolve and achieve greater results.
Besides organisations, individuals can also organise their inboxes and supercharge their WhatsApp with Cooby Extension for free. With the extension, they can create custom tabs according to their needs, schedule events, set reminders, take down notes, and more. These features enable them to achieve inbox-zero and boost overall inbox productivity.
