Malaysian business messaging app Respond.io bags $7 million in Series A

Respond.io, a Malaysia-based enterprise client communication startup has raised $7 million in its Series A funding round led by Headline, with participation from AltalR Capital, Smart Partnership Capital, Sterling Oak Group, and Calendula Ventures.

• The capital will be used to further attract enterprises by increasing its stack of integration capabilities and expanding its offering beyond Asia, moving to the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, the startup claims.
• Respond.io provides a central dashboard for multiple messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Line, Viber, Telegram, and WeChat. It is used by 10,000 companies among which are Klook, Decathlon, Abenson, Yoho, Roche, ShareChat, and Bigo among others.
• Alongside processing over 140 million messages monthly and consolidating the messages, Respond.io's dashboard provides marketing, selling, and support tools that can perform automated functions such as building chat menus, drip campaigns, internal pipelines, and invoking external actions.
• The consumer communication startup has 25xed its revenues since it last raised funds in 2020, it claims. The startup evolved from an omnichannel messaging platform created by Gerardo Salandra, Hassan Ahmed, and Laroslav Kudritskiy in 2017 to integrating APIs to enable instant business messaging.
• The startup is consumer-centric and it allows users to indicate features they would like to experience in its products. It recently launched Respond.io in Spanish to cater to 30% of its customers who are in Spanish-speaking countries and also rolled out a Contact Merge tool, an algorithm to let user messages be consolidated on its platform.