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
By continuing to invest in the company, Respond.io will use this money to expand their services to larger businesses, open offices in the Middle East, Europe and Latin America, and further expand their integration capabilities.
Small brands pioneered the latest round of digital commerce innovation through social media like Instagram, according to respond.io CEO Gerardo Salandra. He said these brands were able to accelerate purchase decisions through messaging apps like WhatsApp through social commerce. Through this strategy, multi-national corporations were able to scale the same innovative strategy to millions of interactions via the respond.io platform daily across numerous teams.
CTO Hassan Ahmed stated that respond.io processes over 140 million messages every month. He claimed this was an industry-leading figure, and at least ten times more than Trengo’s messaging services. Additionally, Ahmed said that these services are supported by an ‘incredible infrastructure’ for servicing large customers.
Akio Tanaka, a partner at Headline, stated “We are impressed by the respond.io company’s growth trajectory thanks to its product-driven growth strategy and organic marketing. We believe the company has the potential to change enterprise client communication across different industries thanks to its technology. We are proud to support the respond.io team as they continue on their path.”
How Was The Idea Born?
The founders of Respond.io were Iaroslav Kudritskiy, Hassan Ahmed and Gerardo Salandra. They cofounded the Malaysian messaging inbox startup after noticing a lack of focus on instant messaging in Salesforce and Hubspot. Despite the lack of attention to this category, there was an obvious need for it, according to CEO Salandra. He is a Forbes 30 Under 30 member who worked for Google, IBM and Runtastic— which was later acquired by Adidas. After leaving these companies, he decided to focus on creating an omnichannel messaging inbox.
Respond.io provides businesses with a way to communicate with their customers across email, web chats and instant messaging apps. This helps companies that aren’t active in the messaging sector to still take advantage of incredible opportunities.
Centralised Dashboard For Communication
The platform Respond.io provides businesses with a dashboard they can use to contact customers on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, Viber and WeChat. The platform allows users to create automated workflows that enable building chat menus, drip campaigns, pipes and actions that can be invoked. Additionally, managers can quickly respond to any conversation in a central location that notices if any have been dropped. Clients can also benefit from swift and competent responses to their problems when using the platform.
Already, 10,000 companies — including Klook, Decathlon, Abenson, Yoho, Roche and Bigo — use Respond.io.
