Malaysian commerce platform Respond.io raises $7m for global expansion

Malaysia-based social to conversational commerce platform Respond.io has announced raising $7 million in its Series A funding round led by venture capital investor Headline.

The funding round was also participated by AltaIR Capital, Smart Partnership Capital, Sterling Oak Group, and Calendula Ventures, according to the announcement.

Instant messaging has become the primary method of client communication globally and especially in Southeast Asia. People in this region tend to use the most messaging apps out there.

Companies that are not active on this channel 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.

The platform enables messages from any channel to be responded from one centralized dashboard by teams of all sizes, thus making communication with customers easier, faster, and more satisfactory.

Over 10,000 companies, including Klook, Decathlon, Abenson, Yoho, Roche, ShareChat and Bigo already use respond.io, and up to date the company processes more messages than its 3 main competitors combined.

Respond.io has grown its revenue 25x since the previous round and 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, 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”.

Before founding respond.io, its CEO Gerardo Salandra (Forbes 30 Under 30) worked at a few software companies, including Runtastic (acquired by Adidas), Google, and IBM. He realized 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.