India-based conversational messaging startup, Gupshup became the tenth startup to join India’s unicorn club this year, after raising US$ 100 million in Series F funding on 8 April 2021. The company increased its value by ten-folds to US$ 1.4B.
Gupshup’s last funding round was in 2011. In 2020, the company saw an annual revenue run rate of US$ 150 million.
Investors: The funding round was led by Tiger Global Management. The company’s investors include – CRV, Globespan Capital Partners, Helion Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital, Lloyd George Management, Cambrian Ventures and HTGS. It is interesting to note that Tiger Global has also led the round behind four of the startups that gained unicorn status this week including – Meesho, Groww, Gupshup and Sharechat.
Purpose of the funding: The funds will be utilized by the company to rapidly scale its product and go-to-market initiatives worldwide, to accelerate the transformation of B2C interactions with conversational experiences delivered over messaging channels.
About Gupshup
Founded in 2004 by Beerud Sheth, Gupshup enables users to communicate and share their short messages privately and publicly. Gupshup has developed a smart-messaging app, Teamchat, which introduced patent-pending “smart” messages in 2014, only now being offered by other messaging apps. The Smart messaging platform provides tools helping developers to quickly and easily build, test, deploy, monitor and track bots and other smart messaging services. The company is headquartered in Cupertino, California.
Gupshup’s application programming interface helps businesses to increase customer engagement across more than 30 communication channels. It provides chatbots, bot building tools, omnichannel inbox capabilities, conversational AI and client-side software to manage communications. The company claims that its API enables over 100,000 developers and businesses to build conversational experiences, delivering over 6 billion messages per month.
What the CEO has to say: “The pandemic has accelerated the business need to touch base with their customers digitally and create messaging and conversational experiences. Further, there is a need to now create a two-way conversational experience enabling higher value to customers. We will invest in product innovation and internal research and development, through this fundraise.” — Beerud Sheth, Gupshup co-founder and CEO.
What the investors have to say: “The growth in business use of messaging and conversational experiences, transforming virtually every customer touchpoint, is an exciting secular trend. Gupshup is uniquely positioned to win in this market with a differentiated product, a clear and sustainable moat. The company’s unique combination of scale, growth and profitability attracted us.” — John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global Management.
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