Malaysian based respond.io raises US$7mil to bring social commerce to enterprise

• On track to lead the market globally with social to conversational commerce
• Built infra to service huge customers, processes over 140 mil messages per month

Respond.io, a Malaysia-based social to conversational commerce platform has raised US$7 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Headline with participation from AltaIR Capital, Smart Partnership Capital, Sterling Oak Group & Calendula Ventures.

Respond.io has grown its revenue 25x since the seed round in Jan 2020 when it raised US$1.8 million. It will use the funding to continue its push into large enterprises by extending its suite of integration capabilities, expanding from its home in Asia to build a presence in the Middle East, Europe & 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,” says Gerardo Salandra (pix), 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.”

Malaysia particularly boasts some stunning figures on messaging apps users in the region. For instance, with more than 25 million WhatsApp active users in Malaysia, businesses must optimally leverage this to communicate their brands and potentially deliver sales. To do that, however, integrating messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram or WeChat into businesses’ existing customer relationship management (CRM) is crucial. Respond.io makes this crucial process seamless and successful.

It has introduced advanced analytics, automation and marketing tools built from the ground up for messaging while enabling over 10,000 businesses, including industry heavyweights like, Klook, Decathlon, Abenson, Yoho, Roche, ShareChat & Bigo to leverage the social to conversational commerce revolution.

“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.

Respond.io declares itself on track to lead the market globally with social to conversational commerce solutions at the world's largest brands, nationwide retailers, and other enterprise companies.

The company’s presence in Malaysia will help support the National Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) Policy in ensuring that local enterprises successfully adopt their digital transformation. The solutions respond.io brings will further drive greater development in data analytics through AI-driven technologies as enshrined in the Malaysia’s Digital Economy Blueprint (MyDIGITAL).

Founded in 2017 by Gerardo Salandra, Hassan Ahmed and  Iaroslav Kudritskiy, respond.io built an omni-channel messaging inbox and found quick success in countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines & Malaysia.