Bengaluru-based conversational AI startup Yellow Messenger has landed a $20 million funding check from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lightspeed India Partners as part of its Series B funding round on Thursday. Lightspeed Venture had also led the startup’s Series A round last year, during which it raised $4 million. The current round will take the total investment for Yellow Messenger to $24 million to date.
While chatbots aren’t as mainstream as one would have hoped a few years back, they are surely making their mark now with companies like Intercom leading the way. Intercom raised around $240 million to build out its customer communication platform that uses AI to push customer conversations along the most efficient routes.
“One in every three companies globally is implementing conversational AI and chatbots—the pull is irreversible. Ever since we met the Yellow Messenger team at our Lightspeed Extreme Entrepreneurs program in 2018, we have seen how the company has taken advantage of this market pull with its rapid time-to-value, transactional platform and multi-language support for global rollouts,” said Dev Khare, Partner, Lightspeed India Partners.
Speaking on the occasion, Amy Wu, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners, said she was bullish about the prospects of the startup as the world pushed towards automation to streamline work.
“In less than three years, Yellow Messenger has quickly established itself as a leader in conversational AI for the enterprise. We anticipate demand for the company’s platform to accelerate as consumer expectations of real-time conversations with their brands deepen.”
What makes Yellow Messenger stand out is that it “enables enterprises to automate and orchestrate workflows for customer and employee engagement with minimal human intervention, utilizing chatbots across multiple communication channels like Microsoft Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, telephony, digital assistants and integrated with the enterprise’s existing System of Record and System of Engagement.”
“We’ve seen huge demand for our conversational AI platform since the very beginning, achieving 5X growth in bookings, year over year, since 2017,” said Raghu Ravinutala, CEO and Co-Founder, Yellow Messenger in a statement sent to The Tech Portal.
“With rapid advancements in voice tech, AI and multilingual capabilities, our product has consistently offered a truly scalable solution by delivering meaningful and measurable results to enterprises across the globe. This investment will help us scale our operations and speed track the R&D endeavors to service the surge in global demand for automation,” he added.
The startup is powering 30 million monthly conversations on chatbots, across more than 100 customers around the globe, including Accenture, Bajaj Finance, Byjus, Dominos India, Flipkart, Grab, MG Motors, Royal Enfield, Spencer’s Retail, Tata AIG, and Xiaomi India. The company has also forged deep go-to-market partnerships with Microsoft, TCS, WhatsApp, Facebook and more.
The fresh capital will be used to expand across the international markets, including the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific markets.
