Respond.io Aims to Lead Social Commerce After $7 Million Series A Round – Financeupdates

• A platform for social to conversational commerce has raised $7 million in Series A.
• The company’s revenue has increased 25 times since its previous round of fundraising.
• The company is concentrating mainly on interacting with the nation’s major telecom operators.

With participation from AltaIR Capital, Smart Partnership Capital, Sterling Oak Group, and Calendula Ventures, Respond.io, a platform for social to conversational commerce, has raised $7 million in Series A investment. Headline led the round.

Respond.io has increased its strategy and investment in the UAE as it seeks to lead the emerging social commerce field as the country’s e-commerce business maintains its phenomenal growth.

Respond.io has experienced a phenomenal 236 percent revenue growth in the UAE over the past year, making it one of the company’s biggest income generators.

This accomplishment has been made possible by the business’s singular capacity to enable merchants to use instant messaging to transform social media interactions into sales while cultivating enduring brand loyalty. The effectiveness and broad-scale applicability of react. Numerous prominent companies in the Middle East, like Rotana Hotels, Cosmesurge, Ritchie Bros Middle East, and Hidayath Stainless Steel, are among the hundreds of clients of io that serve a variety of industries.

“Social media usage in the Emirates is among the highest in the world and is fuelling a new wave of digital commerce innovation. Platforms such as Instagram have enabled brands to connect directly with consumers and accelerate their purchase decisions,” says Gerardo Salandra, Respond.io’s CEO.

“Thus far, brands have struggled to create a seamless customer journey from social to messaging channels such as WhatsApp which serve as the critical ‘last mile’ in the purchase process. At respond.io, we have addressed this challenge by delivering an enterprise-grade platform that has been built from the ground up for messaging, with powerful features such as advanced analytics, automation, and marketing tools. This enables multi-national brands to deploy highly innovative strategies at a scale of a million conversations per day across dozens of teams,” he said.

Respond.io’s revenue has increased 25 times since its previous round of fundraising, and it will utilize the additional funding to expand its broad range of integration capabilities in order to continue its push into large companies. The company is concentrating mainly on interacting with the nation’s major telecom operators to make its solutions easily accessible through these service providers’ cloud marketplaces while using the influx of funds to grow its ecosystem of channel partners.

“We are especially keen on further developing our relationship with Etisalat as this would supercharge our growth strategy and make our value proposition more easily and rapidly available to a broad segment of UAE businesses,” Salandra said.

“We’ve created an incredible infrastructure to service these huge customers – we process over 140 million messages per month,” according to Respond.io CTO Hassan Ahmed.

“These metrics are hardly ever made public, but from what I’ve found, this is an industry-leading figure – for instance, it’s at least 10x more messages than our biggest European competitors,” he added.

“It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen a company with this kind of growth trajectory,” says Headline Partner Akio Tanaka.