WhatsApp has more than two billion users worldwide and is a valuable tool for many small businesses. But as they grow, even WhatsApp Business may not be able to meet their needs. This is where WATI (WhatsApp Group Inbox) is entered. Built on the WhatsApp for Business API, WATI has customer sales and engagement tools created for the messaging app. Today, the Hong Kong and Malaysia-headquartered startup announced that it has raised $23 billion in Series B funding to grow its team and product.
The round was led by Tiger Global, with returning investors Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, and new investors DST Global Partners and Shopify (marking the e-commerce platform’s first investment in a startup operating in the Southeast Asian region). WATI’s last round of funding was an $8.3 million Series A announced 10 months ago, and the new round brings it to more than $35 million raised since 2020.
WATI founders Bianco Ho and Ken Yung started working together in 2016, building Clare.AI, a comprehensive AI digital assistant for large Asian enterprises. In the year In 2020, they launched WATI to provide SMBs with a self-service low-code product based on the WhatsApp Business API. The startup currently has more than 6,000 customers in 75 countries, including SMBs such as home cleaning, schools, learning centers, edtech, fintech, medical facilities, D2C brands and Shopify stores.
Ho told TechCrunch when she and Yeung were working on Clare.AI, “Our assumption was that only large enterprises had the resources to deploy a successful digital assistant with artificial intelligence. After a few years of working with their customers, however, the two realized that many wanted a simpler solution, so WATI was created. One of the reasons for the startup was the digital acceleration that the pandemic brought about, as many businesses rushed to get online.
WATI founders Ken Yung and Bianca Ho
In many emerging markets and mature markets such as Europe, WhatsApp is the preferred communication channel between consumers and businesses. WATI helps non-technical businesses improve customer support, customer engagement and procurement through CRM.
WATI’s customer engagement software is built on the WhatsApp Business API and allows customers to send personalized notifications. The platform includes a collaborative team inbox for use by multiple agents and features such as smart routing, canned responses, data tagging and analytics. Interactions can be automated with low-code workflows and chatbots, and with e-commerce platforms and CRMs. WATI has integrations with platforms like Zoho, Shopify and Google Sheets.
An example of how WATI is used is a large e-commerce company that relies on it to manage campaigns such as Prime Day. The company usually gets 60 to 100 messages a day from customers in the WATI team’s inbox, most of which come from its website’s WhatsApp chat, and it sends around 30,000 messages a day when campaigns are active.
Another example is an edtech client who has used WATI for about two years. They rely on about 50 templates per month for lead generation, nurturing, payment reminders and class updates, and send 20,000 to 30,000 messages per day. WATI helps them get high quality organic leads with a WhatsApp widget on their website.
According to Ho, WATI’s closest competitor is the native WhatsApp Business app, which most SMBs start using, but WATI is suited to the size of their business.
Funding will be spent on hiring and investing in WATI’s product stack for small code automation. The company also plans to expand into emerging markets such as Latin America and Southeast Asia.
