Customer, Sales Engagement Tool WATI Raises $23M

Customer and sales engagement tool WATI (WhatsApp Team Inbox) has raised $23 million in a Series B funding round led by Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital India & Southeast Asia, DST Global Partners, and Shopify.

WATI plans to use the funds for scaling the teams, product enhancement, and expanding  the customer base in India and key markets.

The new round brings the firm’s total raised since 2020 to more than US$35 million. It earlier raised $8.3 million in Series A ten months ago.

Bianca Ho and Ken Yeung launched WATI in 2020 to help SMEs with a self-service, low-code product on the WhatsApp Business API.

The company enables companies to have scalable, yet personalised conversations with its customer engagement software that is built on WhatsApp’s Business API. Through the WATI platform, SMEs can support their customers through a collaborative team inbox with multiple agents, smart routing, canned responses, data tagging, and analytics. Many of these interactions can be automated through low-code workflow builders and chatbots. 

WATI has over 6,000 customers across 78 countries, including SMEs providing domestic house cleaning services to schools, tutorial centres, medical institutions and e-commerce, and Shopify stores. 

Ho said: “We doubled down on our product with more automations, making it a seamless digital tool and must-have for any business. We went vertical in our approach and created integrations and partnerships with Zoho, Shopify, Google Sheets among others to really help scale growth and sharpen the product. The team has grown, revenue and customer numbers have doubled and now we look to scale the business, operations, teams around the world.”

Yeung added: “The business messaging market has grown enormously. Meta estimates that around a billion people per week communicate with a business or service account across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. This insight is critical for what’s happening now and what’s coming ahead. About 40 per cent of Meta’s advertisers globally — over 4 million businesses — use click-to-message ads, which redirect people from Facebook or Instagram into one of Meta’s messaging products to chat with a business. WATI is well placed to service this demand and beyond.”