Gupshup raises additional $240 million to fast-track global Conversational Messaging vision

I’m excited to share that Gupshup raised an additional $240 million in funding from a group of industry-leading investors including Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC, Tiger Global (who made an additional investment), Think Investments, Malabar Investments, Harbor Spring Capital, certain accounts managed by Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers LLC, White Oak and Neeraj Arora, among others. These funds will go towards a share buyback from employees and existing investors as well as towards continued growth in the business. This round is an extension of the previous $100 million funding round led by Tiger Global in April.

A portion of the funds will be used for a partial share buyback from employees and early investors. Nothing in my entrepreneurial journey gives me more satisfaction than sharing our company’s success with our employees. I’m also grateful to the early investors that put their faith in us and glad we can give them a great return.

In my earlier note, written at the time of the April funding, I outlined our rich history of innovation in messaging and conversational technologies and introduced a vision of a future where customers interact and transact with businesses on their messaging apps via conversational messaging.

Since then we have been very busy executing. We doubled our staff strength, hiring talented individuals across virtually every function including engineering, product, marketing, sales, customer success and more. We continue to add conversational AI specialists to the team.  We’ve expanded our management team to drive our growth in India and in mobile-first regions around the world. We are also actively looking to expand through recruiting as well as M&A.

We have accelerated our product innovation in Conversational AI to enable the creation of intelligent bots and improve on-device messaging experiences. We are strengthening our AI Tools and Workbench along with pre-built, pre-tested AI data models that work in a plug-n-play mode.  Listen to our podcast episode on Conversational AI here.

We have launched conversational solutions to enable Digital Commerce businesses. Enabling digital commerce with conversational messaging helps businesses across industries take their customers on conversational journeys on messaging apps, across marketing, commerce and support workflows. Customers can discover products, pay for them, track delivery, provide feedback and get support, while chatting with their favourite brands like they would with friends and family. Listen to our podcast episode on Conversational Commerce here

Built on the Gupshup IP (GIP) messaging channel, we developed and launched solutions for the digitization of restaurants, solutions to transform Out-of-Home advertising and 1-click bill payment solutions to make collecting payments via messages more efficient for businesses. We’ve strengthened our messaging platform by adding advanced APIs to simplify multi-step journeys like KYC, Loan Processing and also APIs for exciting new channels like Instagram.

There are many new products brewing in the labs. Please expect to hear from us about an accelerating stream of innovation.

In closing, we remain focused on our vision, wedded to innovation, committed to our customers and eager to hire talented employees as we accelerate towards a world where conversations drive business.