After WiseWorks and Enabld, a Malaysian social-to-conversational commerce platform, Respond.io, has secured $7 million in Series A funding. The financing round was led by Headline alongside participation from AltaIR Capital, Smart Partnership Capital, Sterling Oak Group, and Calendula Ventures.
Expansion plans
Respond.io will use the investment to continue its push into large enterprises by extending its suite of integration capabilities, and expanding its presence in the Middle East, Europe, and LATAM.
“The latest wave of digital commerce innovation was pioneered by small brands using Instagram. It uses social commerce to drive buyers onto tailor-made social accounts and enables consumers to accelerate their purchase decisions through WhatsApp & other messengers,” said Gerardo Salandra, CEO of respond.io. “We’ve built a platform that enables multi-national brands to deploy that highly innovative strategy at a scale of a million conversations per day across dozens of teams”.
“We’ve created an incredible infrastructure to service these huge customers — we process over 140 million messages per month,” said Hassan Ahmed, CTO at respond.io. “These metrics are hardly ever made public, but from what I’ve found, this is an industry-leading figure — for instance, it’s at least 10x more messages than our biggest European competitor Trengo.”
“We’re impressed with respond.io growth trajectory, achieved through product-led growth strategy and organic marketing,” said Akio Tanaka, Partner at Headline. ”We see the huge potential behind the respond.io technology, and are proud to support the team on its way to transform enterprise client communication across the industries.”
How was the idea born?
Respond.io was founded by Gerardo Salandra, Hassan Ahmed and Iaroslav Kudritskiy as an omni-channel messaging inbox in Malaysia. Prior to this startup, CEO Salandra, a Forbes 30 Under 30 member, worked at a few software companies, including Runtastic (acquired by Adidas), Google, and IBM. He realised that companies like Hubspot and Salesforce primarily were focused on email while leaving the instant messaging category practically untouched, even though there was an obvious need for it.
Companies that are not active in messaging miss out on tremendous opportunities, and Respond.io fills in this gap. It unifies customer communication and provides businesses with the right tools to market, sell and provide support across instant messaging apps, web chat and email.
Centralised dashboard for communication
Respond.io helps businesses reach their customers directly on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, Viber, Telegram, WeChat, etc. from a centralised dashboard. The platform provides flexible automation via workflows that lets users build chat menus, drip campaigns, internal pipelines, and invoke external actions. Managers can quickly pick up on any conversation and notice if any have been dropped. At the same time, clients can enjoy competent and swift responses solving their problems.
Over 10,000 companies, including Klook, Decathlon, Abenson, Yoho, Roche, ShareChat and Bigo already use Respond.io.
