Manychat taps $140M to boost its business messaging platform with AI

Chatbots and other types of artificial intelligence agents – and the companies you build – may feel like ten cents these days. But the truth is that, for both companies and consumers, some of them may be more useful (and perhaps less Dystopian) than others. Today, a young company that has been designed for a successful success on this concept announces a major growth tour to expand its business. Manechat, which provides brands with a tool for managing and automating conversations and sharing through multiple correspondence channels, which achieved $ 140 million led by Summit Partners.

Funding comes in the wake of strong growth to start operating. Today there are about 1.5 million customers in Manychat in 170 countries, with a list of customers including Nike, The New York Times and Yahoo (the current owner of Techcrunch) as well as individual creators and much smaller fashion.

CEO and co -founder Mike Yan said that Manychat sends “billions” of messages annually on behalf of these users via Tiktok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and other chat platforms. The plan will be to use this last round of series B to finance to invest in research and development – especially the introduction of more artificial intelligence in the platform – as well as to increase the company’s sales, marketing and support it globally.

Especially for the start of these days, the Manychat is often profitable – mostly, because as Yan describes, “We are always working on the edge of pronunciation.”

Since the launch of a decade in 2015, it raised only about 23 million dollars, most of which is from this $ 18 million round in 2019 led by BESSEMER with the participation of Flint Capital. (Manychat did not reveal what other investors are in this last round outside the summit.) The company does not provide an evaluation, but it is likely to be much higher than the humble Pitchbook book after the detailed money of the series A.

From Telegram to Instagram

The ManyChat track reflects all the appearance of smartphone -based messaging applications over the past decade, as well as the increasing opportunity about tools to help companies benefit from this means better.

In 2015, the e -mail e -mail fund began to become a method loaded with unwanted messages, fatigue, and excessive use of companies looking to use marketing.

Yan was coming out of the back of the failed social application, and he was the same as the user of the telegram, one of the increasing population of consumers who use correspondence applications for basic communications. When Telegram opened its own application programming facades, the inspiration lamp and his founder Anton Moreen set out.

He recalls, “It was actually one of the first Western correspondence applications that opened its own application programming facades.” “As users of Telegram ourselves, we have seen a clear job to do.” He said that companies were using email to contact users, but this was not the place that users spend time. “They should actually use correspondence applications to communicate with customers, as the new wave of connections occurs. This is where the new consumer is.”

So he and Jourin built the first repetition of the Manychat as a tool to create companies’ chats on Telegram. She picked up enough traction to enter the speed of 500 startups.

After that, when Facebook opens his application programming facades for Messenger-which makes its first special effects to build AI Chatbots-things started to take off. By the time the ManyChat raised the series A in 2019, it was already up to 350 million users on the platform per month with billions of messages and an open rate of 80 %.

Additional application programming facades that open via other accessible platforms as well as TIKTOK have strengthened this growth. Yan said that users can still market Telegram as well, although these days are only a small percentage of traffic. For the record, Yan said, Instagram is far from the most active and active platform for the company today.

Manychat has already been established and a large part of its growth AI’s upness and emergency state of AI Chatbots such as Clauds, Openai’s Chatgpt, and Google’s Gemini, among other things. In fact, the previous descriptions of the product described how it provided a “intelligent mixture of automation and personal communication” for customers, who were using its non -code to build Chatbots to develop social followers, collect email addresses, respond to comments and prepare flows via DM links to order products or more information about something.

Yan said that the consolidation of its products on encouraging additional procedures is what distinguishes it from most of the chat in the market now, including most Chatbots Genai.

Sofia Popova, the summit partner who led the investment and joins the startup council, believes that the Maanychat approach to building a connection layer has witnessed a lot of success so far makes it a strong bet on the next wave of activity on correspondence platforms.

She said in an interview: “Our thesis depends on a greater percentage of trade dollars that pass through social correspondence applications.” “You should always be around the clock throughout the week. On the contrary, she said, when looking at the AI ​​Chatbots DNA – at least what is on the market today -” a few of them are directed towards allocating the conversation in a way that pushes the transfer to revenues. “

She added that there are countless tools there are countless tools there, but in fact a few of the involvement to sell or obtain other responses from users the way Manychat did.

However, given the frequency of development – and the drive that many emerging companies from artificial intelligence must generate revenues to compensate for its huge monetary burning – this is a gap that may not be there for a long time, one of the reasons that make Manychat build more artificial intelligence features to improve its width.