Talking To Customers: Yalochat Raises $15M Series B

Conversational commerce platform Yalochat secured a $15 million Series B to continue to help large enterprises use messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, to manage sales and customer service operations.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

B Capital Group, co-founded by Facebook’s Eduardo Saverin, led the round with participation from existing investor Sierra Ventures. With this new investment, San Francisco-based Yalochat has raised a total of $25 million since its inception in 2015, Javier Mata, founder and CEO, told Crunchbase News. This amount includes an $8 million Series A in March 2019, according to Crunchbase data.

Saverin, co-founder and managing partner, said in a written statement that B Capital was “impressed” with Yalochat’s team, products and growth trajectory.

“Conversational commerce has become mission-critical to companies looking for new ways to engage with potential customers on their preferred messaging channels,”  he added. “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 US, where Yalochat can help companies bridge the gap between existing software solutions and the vast world of messaging apps.”

Yalochat manages the digital workflow for sales and customer service through mini applications that run on top of messaging apps, allowing customers to get what they want from businesses in a personalized way, Mata said.

“When customers interact with large businesses, they often face clunky systems, and the experience of the end-user is not taken into account,” he added. “We have built a better way of interacting, where the end-user can use messaging.”

ResearchandMarkets expects the conversational AI software market to grow to $15.7 billion by 2024. The report said drivers for the growth are increased demand for AI-powered customer support services, omni-channel deployment, and reduced chatbot development costs.

Since raising its Series A last year, the company has been in growth mode, opening offices across Latin America, Brazil and India, as large enterprises roll out Yalochat’s services to their global offices. For example, Yalochat is helping Coca-Cola in Brazil, where they sell to small businesses that had been doing much of its workflow with pen and paper or tablet, Mata said.

“They had previously tried to get them to use a website or download an app and were successful,” he added. “We enabled them to use an app like Messenger, WhatsApp and iMessage to communicate with customers and drive sales.”

Meanwhile, the company’s revenue has been growing five times year over year. Particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, Yalochat’s platform has seen a tenfold increase in volume and a 650 percent increase of message volume, as companies connect digitally on WhatsApp, Mata said.

The company plans to expand its team and continue hiring around the world, including Europe, South Asia and soon into the U.S.

“We are definitely growing our product to build a true CRM and continue consolidating our markets,” Mata added. “We are leaders in Latam when it comes to conversational commerce and are on the path to becoming a top platform in India.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman