Series B financing led by B Capital Group to fuel Yalochat’s rapid growth in Latam and Asia
San Francisco, 20th of August, 2020 - Yalochat, the leading conversational commerce platform in emerging markets, announced today that it raised $15 million in Series B funding led by B Capital Group with participation from existing investor Sierra Ventures. With this financing, Yalochat has raised a total of $25 million.
In today’s customer-first age, successfully maintaining customer relationships has become a key priority for businesses to stay competitive in their industries. Conversational commerce has been steadily growing, leading global companies like Coca Cola and Walmart to seek and implement top-tier solutions for connecting with their customers. MarketsandMarkets valued the Conversational AI Software market at $4.2B in 2019 and projected growth to $15.7B by 2024. This growth is driven by increasing demand for AI-powered business automation, omni-channel deployment, and reducing AI development costs.
“Conversational commerce has become mission-critical to companies looking for new ways to engage with potential customers on their preferred messaging channels. From the beginning, B Capital has been extremely impressed by the Yalochat team, products and growth path,” said B Capital Group co-founder and Managing Partner Eduardo Saverin, also known for co-founding Facebook. “This is also B Capital’s first investment in the Latam region and I am personally looking forward to helping them create new, meaningful connections between Latam, Asia and the U.S., where Yalochat can help companies bridge the gap between existing software solutions and the vast world of messaging apps."
In emerging markets, users spend more than 84% of smartphone usage time on messaging apps but messaging applications have been overlooked by traditional CRM companies. Yalochat recognized this gap and developed a platform to allow businesses to interact and run their most critical workflows on top of popular messaging apps. By adopting the new platform businesses have been able to sell more and serve their customers better. “The app ecosystem has failed to meet both business and user expectations. In emerging markets, 70% of apps are uninstalled or not used 2 months after being downloaded. Given the high usage of messaging apps, it made more sense to build a platform where users can get what they want from businesses they interact with in a direct and personalized way through mini apps,” explained Javier Mata, CEO and founder of Yalochat.
Yalochat has offices across Latin America and India and a global presence through partnerships in other emerging markets. The platform now powers conversational commerce for leading global enterprises including Walmart, Amazon, Pepsi, Dominos, Unilever, and more. The company was created specifically for the messaging era, allowing customers like Coca Cola (KOF) to increase their sales by running their entire commerce workflows on Yalochat. In Asia, leading banks like ICICI in India have been able to reduce their costs by allowing customers to do all their banking transactions through WhatsApp via that Yalochat integration.
“We decided to partner with B Capital in this round because of their global presence and experience. We will continue to invest in our priority: making our customers extremely successful through our conversational workflows and building a true CRM for the messaging era. We’ll continue to expand into the Asian market, while consolidating our presence in Brazil and Spanish-speaking Latam,” said Mata.
“Yalochat is transforming how large companies in emerging markets manage digital workflows for enterprise operations like sales and customer service. Their focus on messaging channels is filling a void left by Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft, which is experiencing dramatic growth. Yalochat has grown very rapidly since our investment 18 months ago, and the current environment has only accelerated the need for contactless customer engagement. This financing round will enable the company to continue its rapid growth into new markets,” added Mark Fernandes from Sierra Ventures, an existing investor in Yalochat.
In addition to the new round of funding, Yalochat appointed Adam Bosworth, CRM veteran and former Vice President at Google, Salesforce, and Amazon as an advisor. Bosworth explained, “Over a decade ago, the smartphone revolutionized how we access information and connect with each other and with services around the world. But despite the growth in messaging platforms that offer real-time, contextualized conversation and connectivity, the opportunity to build relevant apps on top of these channels has been largely overlooked outside of companies like WeChat in China. Yalochat is the first company to truly recognize the incredible potential of software that marries the value of app-based services with the ease and connectivity of device-based messaging channels.”
Yalochat’s mission is to build a platform to enable enterprises to digitally engage and delight their customers over messaging, and the recent pandemic has continued to fuel their purpose. “Over the past few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has proven the importance of conversational workflows and the potential our technology has to make the day of people. We donated our technology to the governments of Mexico and Colombia, so they could handle the spike in demand for healthcare by advising and even providing COVID diagnosing to their citizens in an easier, faster, safer way through WhatsApp. We also worked with our clients to help them adapt to this new reality in record time, which led to thousands of saved jobs. We wanted to prove that great technology can be developed anywhere by building the first global software company out of Latin America. We know that technology can help solve many critical problems that emerging markets face and now, more than ever, we are committed to using our knowledge to promote economic and social development,” Mata concluded.
About Yalochat
Yalochat is the leading conversational commerce platform in emerging markets. Through its unique technology, the platform helps large enterprises manage their digital workflow for critical operations in sales and customer service through mini applications that run on top of messaging apps, allowing customers to get what they want of businesses in a personalized way. The company is focused on emerging markets, including Latin America, India, and Southeast Asia, with global clients like Amazon, Coca Cola Femsa, Unilever, Walmart, ICICI bank, among others.
To learn more, visit www.yalochat.com
If you need more information please contact:
Lina Obregón, Public Relations @ Yalo. lina@yalochat.com +5215585779651
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