Yalochat, a five-year-old conversational commerce platform based in Mexico City that enables customers like Coca Cola and Walmart to upsell, collect payments, and better serve their own customers through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat in China Offer closed $ 15M Series B funding led by B Capital Group.
Sierra Ventures, what led a $ 10 million Series A funding for the company in early 2019 also participated.
The round isn’t that surprising if you want to believe Yalochat’s numbers. It is said that since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform’s volume has increased tenfold and message volume increased 650% as more and more large companies – especially outside of the US – use messaging apps to manage some of their problems Sales operations and much of their customer service.
Yalochat is also chasing a rapidly growing market. According to 10-year-old Indian market research company MarketsandMarkets, the conversational AI software market is expected to generate sales of $ 4.8 billion this year more than three times this amount until 2025.
Conglomerates are sure to accelerate the growth of the company.
“We started out with Coca Cola in Brazil and helped them run their business when it comes to talking to small corner shops,” says Yalochat founder and CEO Javier Mata, a Columbia University graduate Studied engineering and founded three more companies from 2013 before starting Yalochat.
“They had such a successful ordering process that they took us to Mexico and Colombia and we talk to them [them about entering into the] Philippines and India. “Mata says,” You are trying to be successful in one market quickly and the conglomerate is taking you to other areas of the business so that they can optimize their sales and customer service workflows in other countries. “
Mata makes the process sound terribly simple, especially when you consider that Dozens of startups also focus on conversational commerce as well Fundraising right now.
Still, he argues that if you build your product right, it will become a breeze for customers.
At pitching companies like Walmart, for example, he said Yalochat would “start with something super simple but high value that they could bring to market in a week. We’d say, ‘This sales process took years [to organize], we can bring it out for you by Friday. ‘Then we would just do it.
“It was a small investment for them to try us out, and as soon as they saw our conversion rates, we were introduced to others [units] with the company. “Mata says,” I think why a lot of other companies haven’t been successful, is it [their tech] isn’t easy or doesn’t really work. We made ours scalable, easy to start, and ran smoothly without passing that complexity on to end users. “
B Capital clearly buys what Yalochat sells. Firm co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who is known to be the co-founder of Facebook, calls Mata and his team “phenomenally strong” and suggests that there is currently little that can stop their trajectory. “Yalo is an example of a Latin American business that already exists in Asia today. And if you’re building a large business conversational commerce function that is redefining the way they touch customers – [meaning] Messaging applications, currently the most attractive medium in the world – should that really be limited to Latin America or Asia? Absolutely not.”
Saverin compares the startup to B Capital itself, which has offices in LA, San Francisco, New York and Singapore.
The company has already placed bets in the US, Europe and Asia since it started operations in 2015. Now Yalo has its first investment with Yalo, which is mainly headquartered in Latin America.
“For us,” says Saverin, who grew up in Brazil, “we didn’t invest everywhere on the first day. But that’s the mission. “